Skip to main content
Main

To Roil Carrots

Carrots boiled and simmered in salted water, then finished in beef broth or veal gravy with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 Roil Carrots

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and scrape the carrots lightly or pare them thinly, removing blemishes.

  2. If large, divide them and cut thick parts into quarters.

  3. Trim the upper parts of the carrots to 2.5‑inch lengths and point one end to resemble a sugar‑loaf.

Boil and glaze

  1. Rinse the carrots and boil them in salted water: 20-30 minutes for young carrots, 1.5-2 hours for full-grown ones.

  2. Boil the prepared carrots in salted water for 45 minutes.

  3. Drain the carrots and arrange them upright in a saucepan.

  4. Pour in hot beef broth or veal gravy to half their height, add salt and 1 teaspoon of sugar.

  5. 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.

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 main body of the dish, providing the cooked vegetable texture and sweetness.
Beef broth or veal gravy
Adds savoury flavour and body to the liquid that the carrots simmer in.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the carrots take on a glaze as the liquid reduces.

The step that matters

Boiling the carrots in the broth. Boiling briskly reduces the liquid and concentrates the sugars and savoury flavour, so the carrots glaze rather than stay watery. Carrots left too long in boiling water can turn soft and lose shape.

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.

More boiled carrots recipes

and Turnips 5 See all 49 →

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipes