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Carrots in Their Own Juice

Carrots simmered in their own juice, seasoned with salt, pepper, butter, and optional parsley, cream, flour, 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 Their Own Juice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

Cook

  1. In a pot, bring salted water to a boil and add the sliced carrots, ensuring they are just covered.

  2. Boil gently until the carrots are tender, then quickly evaporate most of the water, leaving only a spoonful.

  3. Season with pepper and add a small amount of butter, tossing gently until the juice thickens and coats the carrots.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately. Optionally, sprinkle with minced parsley, or mix in thick cream with a little flour to prevent curdling, 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
Provide the main body of the dish and, as they cook, the sweet juice that forms the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the reduced juice turn glossy and coat the carrots.
Thick cream
Optionally adds richness and body to the juice; flour helps stabilize it against curdling.

The step that matters

Evaporating the water. If the water is not reduced quickly, the carrots stay watery and the juice never thickens into a coating. Once only a spoonful remains, tossing with butter lets the juice emulsify and cling to the carrots.

Swap the parsley

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

  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, cream, flour. 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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