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Carrots.

Carrots boiled in salted water, then simmered in beef broth or veal gravy, thickened with butter and flour, served with parsley and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Carrots.

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.

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Select good carrots of equal size and cut the tops into even lengths of about 2.5 inches, trimming one end to a point.

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

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

Braise

  1. Pour in hot beef broth or veal gravy to half their height, adding salt and sugar.

  2. Boil briskly for 30 minutes or longer if needed.

Thicken and serve

  1. Keep the carrots hot while thickening gravy with butter and flour, adding parsley and lemon juice.

  2. Serve the carrots with the thickened gravy or sauce.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Carrot + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,351 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,606 recipes

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

  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
Form the main body of the dish and absorb the flavour of the broth as they cook.
Beef broth or veal gravy
Provides the savoury liquid that flavours the carrots and becomes the base of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the sauce and helps carry flavour.
Flour
Thickens the gravy into a smooth sauce when cooked with butter.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich gravy.

The step that matters

Boil briskly for 30 minutes. Boiling the liquid down concentrates its flavour and reduces it so the carrots finish tender and glazed rather than watery. Keeping the liquid at half the carrots' height lets the gravy reduce around them.

“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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