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Carrots with Parsley Sauce

Carrots cooked in salted water, then tossed with butter, parsley, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

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 with Parsley Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and trim the carrots, leaving 2 or 3 tiny leaves on top if very young.

Cook

  1. Put the carrots into boiling salted water and boil for about 15 minutes or until tender.

  2. Drain the water, then add the butter, parsley, and lemon juice.

  3. Season with salt and pepper, toss over the heat for a few minutes, then 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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  4. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Small new carrots
Provide the main body of the dish and its sweet, tender texture when boiled.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, coating the carrots and giving them a smooth finish.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the carrots and balances the butter.

The step that matters

Boiling until tender. Carrots cooked too briefly stay firm and fibrous, while overcooking makes them soft and mushy. Checking for tenderness with a knife or fork during the 15 minutes helps find the point where the starch has softened but the shape holds.

Swap the carrot

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

  1. Shallotfits about as well
  2. Carrotthe original
  3. Spinachfits less well
  4. Okrafits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, lemon, pepper. 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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