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Carrots Au Beurre, or Buttered Carrots

Sautéed carrots tossed in melted butter with optional parsley and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Carrots Au Beurre, or Buttered Carrots

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the carrots

  1. Boil the carrots until tender.

  2. Slice them into ¼ inch thick pieces, or slice first and then boil.

  3. Drain the carrots well.

Make the butter sauce and serve

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over low heat.

  2. Add minced parsley, salt, white pepper, and cayenne to the melted butter.

  3. Add the carrots and gently toss until they are evenly coated with the sauce, ensuring it does not boil.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + white peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  5. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Provide the main body and bulk of the dish once cooked until tender.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth coating that carries flavour over the carrots.

The step that matters

Keep the butter sauce from boiling. Butter is an emulsion of fat, water and milk solids. If it boils hard, the water separates and the sauce turns greasy and broken instead of coating the carrots smoothly.

“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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