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To Boil Carrots

A simple boiled carrot dish seasoned with salt, sugar, and beef broth or veal gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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To Boil Carrots

Why it works: Carrot and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,606 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

To Boil Carrots

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the carrots and scrape the skin off lightly with a sharp knife or pare them thinly.

  2. Remove any blemishes and cut large carrots into quarters.

  3. Rinse the carrots and place them in boiling water with salt.

  4. Boil very young carrots for 20 to 30 minutes; full-grown ones for 1.5 to 2 hours.

  5. For presentation, cut the upper parts of the carrots into even lengths of about 2.5 inches and trim one end to a point.

Glaze and serve

  1. After boiling, drain the carrots and arrange them upright in a saucepan.

  2. Pour in hot beef broth or veal gravy to half their height, add salt and a small teaspoon of sugar.

  3. Boil briskly for 30 minutes or longer if needed.

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 + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,606 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Carrot + sugartop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,211 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Beef + sugartop 37% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Form the dish itself, providing the main body, mild sweetness and texture once cooked.
Beef broth or veal gravy
Supplies savoury liquid that flavours the carrots as it reduces around them.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that rounds out the savoury broth and helps the carrots brown lightly.

The step that matters

Boiling the carrots in the broth. Boiling briskly reduces the liquid and concentrates its flavour, while sugar and salt season it. If the liquid boils away too far, the carrots can scorch or dry out.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, sugar):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Tomatofits about as well
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, sugar. 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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