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Carrots Sautes

Sautéed young carrots with butter, sugar, salt, pepper, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 Sautes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carrots

  1. Boil the young carrots in salted water for 8 minutes.

  2. Rub and scrape off the skins.

  3. Cover with boiling water and cook until tender, then drain.

  4. Place in cold water until cool enough to handle.

  5. Cut each carrot in half and into strips.

Sauté and serve

  1. Heat the butter in a frying pan with the sugar, salt, and pepper until boiling.

  2. Add the carrot strips and cook for 3 minutes after boiling resumes.

  3. Sprinkle with chopped parsley.

  4. Toss for 1 minute and drain.

  5. Serve hot.

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 + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Young carrots
Form the main body of the dish and become tender and sweet when cooked.
Butter
Adds fat and richness and helps carry flavour across the carrot strips.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the carrots take on light browning in the pan.

The step that matters

Heating the butter with the sugar until boiling. Butter and sugar can darken and burn quickly once they boil, so the pan must be watched closely. Burnt sugar turns bitter, while a properly melted glaze coats the carrot strips evenly.

Swap the carrot

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

  1. Carrotthe original
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Shallotfits less well
  4. Potatofits less well

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