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Carrots a LA Poulette

Carrots à la Poulette is a French-style carrot dish with butter, flour, stock, sugar, egg, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Carrots a LA Poulette

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carrots

  1. Slice the carrots and cut them into neat shapes.

  2. Scald the carrots in boiling salted water, then drain.

Make the sauce

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter and add the flour, stirring to combine.

  2. Moisten the mixture with stock and heat until hot.

  3. Add the carrots to the sauce and mix well.

  4. Before serving, sprinkle with sugar.

  5. Beat the egg with cream.

  6. Add the beaten mixture to the sauce just before serving.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Carrot + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melted with flour to form a roux that thickens the sauce and adds richness.
All-purpose flour
Combined with melted butter to form a roux that thickens the stock into a sauce.
Stock
Liquid that moistens the roux and forms the body of the sauce.
Egg
Beaten into the sauce at the end to enrich and lightly thicken it.
Cream
Mixed with the egg to add richness and smoothness to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Add the beaten egg and cream just before serving. Egg proteins set when heated and can curdle or scramble if the sauce boils after they are added, so the mixture should be stirred in off the heat or over very gentle heat at the last moment.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, sugar, egg, cream):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, sugar, egg, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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