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Carrots

Boiled carrots served whole or sliced with melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Carrots

Why it works: Carrot and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,083 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Carrots

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil young carrots for 30 minutes or old carrots for 1 to 2 hours until tender.

  2. If the carrots are young, wipe them after boiling; if they are old, scrape them before boiling.

  3. Serve the carrots whole or slice them and pour melted butter over them.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Young carrots
Main vegetable; boiling softens their fibres until tender enough to eat.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, moist coating over the cooked carrots.

The step that matters

Boil until tender. Carrots soften as their cell walls break down with heat, so under-boiling leaves them firm and over-boiling makes them mushy. Checking for tenderness with a fork or knife tip, and matching the time to whether the carrots are young or old, prevents both problems.

“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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