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Carrots in Tueir Oavn Juice

A side dish of boiled carrots thickened with butter and flour, optionally flavored with parsley, cream, or gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 in Tueir Oavn Juice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carrots

  1. Wash the carrots thoroughly and scrape or lightly pare them, removing any discolored parts.

  2. Boil enough salted water to cover the carrots.

  3. Slice the carrots thickly and add them to the boiling water.

Cook and thicken

  1. Boil gently until they are tender, then quickly evaporate most of the water, leaving about a tablespoon.

  2. Dust with pepper and add a small piece of butter rolled in flour.

  3. Toss gently until the juice thickens and coats the carrots.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately. Optionally, sprinkle with minced parsley, or mix in thick cream and flour, or add gravy.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
The main vegetable; their starch and sugars give the dish its body and sweetness.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping the cooking juices turn glossy and smooth.
Flour
Thickens the remaining cooking juice so it clings to the carrots instead of pooling.

The step that matters

Evaporating the water down to about a tablespoon. If too much water remains, the flour and butter cannot thicken the juice into a coating. Reducing quickly concentrates the carrot juices and starch so they form a glaze rather than a thin broth.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, pepper, butter, flour, cream):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Celeryfits less well
  4. Marjoramfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, pepper, butter, flour, cream. 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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