Skip to main content
Main

Carrots and Turnips

A simple boiled carrot and turnip dish seasoned with salt, stock, butter, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Carrots and Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil a saucepan of water.

  2. Add 2 tablespoons of coarse sea salt when the water is boiling.

  3. If using young carrots, add them to the boiling water.

  4. Cook the young carrots for 20 minutes.

  5. Check tenderness with a fork.

  6. Remove the carrots.

  7. Clean them with a cloth.

  8. Wash old carrots.

  9. Scrape old carrots.

  10. Cut old carrots into desired shapes before boiling.

  11. Boil old carrots for 30 to 45 minutes.

Glaze and serve

  1. Place boiled carrots in a stewpan.

  2. Add enough stock to cover the carrots.

  3. Add a piece of butter the size of a nut.

  4. Sprinkle with 2 teaspoons of castor sugar.

  5. Boil without a lid until reduced to a glaze.

  6. Remove from heat.

  7. 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. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Butter + carrottop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,083 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + carrottop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,211 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Main vegetable; cooking softens its fibres until tender, and the sugar and reduced stock give it a glaze.
Stock
Liquid that cooks down with the sugar and butter into a glaze that coats the vegetables.
Castor sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the reduced liquid caramelise into a glaze.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the reduced liquid form a glossy coating.

The step that matters

Boil without a lid until reduced to a glaze. Uncovered boiling lets water evaporate so the stock, sugar and butter thicken and cling to the carrots. With a lid on, the liquid stays thin and the glaze does not form. Watch closely near the end so the sugar does not scorch.

Swap the carrot

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter. 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.

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes