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To Boil Carrots and Parsnips

A simple boiled vegetable dish of carrots and parsnips seasoned with salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,097 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

To Boil Carrots and Parsnips

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Wash and lightly scrape the carrots.

  2. Boil the carrots in salted boiling water until soft, about 1 hour for large ones, and serve small ones whole.

  3. Scrape and prepare the parsnips in the same manner as the carrots.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Softens through boiling to become tender and sweet as starches break down.
Parsnips
Softens through boiling to become tender, with a mild sweetness as starches break down.

The step that matters

Boiling until soft. Large vegetables need the full cooking time to become tender through to the centre. Stopping early leaves a firm, starchy core, so test with a knife before draining.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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