Skip to main content
Side

Carrots and Turnips

A simple boiled root vegetable dish with carrots or turnips simmered in stock, butter, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Carrots and Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Boil

  1. Fill a saucepan with water and bring it to a boil.

  2. Add 2 tablespoons of coarse sea salt to the boiling water.

  3. If using young carrots, add them to the saucepan and boil for 20 minutes. Check tenderness by piercing with a fork.

  4. For older carrots, wash, scrape, and cut them into desired shapes before boiling for 30 to 45 minutes.

  5. Remove the carrots from the saucepan and clean them with a cloth.

Glaze and serve

  1. In a stewpan, combine the boiled carrots with enough stock to cover them.

  2. Add a piece of butter the size of a nut and sprinkle with 2 teaspoons of caster sugar.

  3. Boil with the lid off until reduced to a glaze. Remove from heat and serve.

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. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Butter + carrottop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,083 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + carrottop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,211 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots or turnips
Provide the vegetable base that softens during boiling and takes on the glaze.
Stock
Cooks down with the sugar and butter to form a glossy, flavourful glaze.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the reduced liquid turn into a smooth, glossy coating.
Caster sugar
Sweetens the vegetables and helps the reduced liquid caramelise into a glaze.

The step that matters

Reducing the stock to a glaze. If the liquid reduces too far, the sugar can darken and scorch on the pan, while too little reduction leaves a thin, watery sauce. Watching the pan with the lid off lets the liquid thicken evenly around the carrots.

Swap the carrot

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter. 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 carrots and turnips recipes

Boiled 5 See all 2 →

You might also like

Eggplant CakesEggplant Cakes34 recipesEscalloped Tomatoes (Scalloped Tomatoes)Escalloped Tomatoes (Scalloped Tomatoes)25 recipesParsnip CroquettesParsnip Croquettes12 recipesOnion PuddingOnion Pudding9 recipes