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Carrots With, Brown Sauce

A dish of young carrots simmered in a brown sauce of butter, onion, ham, rice flour, and brown stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 21,601 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Carrots With, Brown Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carrots

  1. Leave the young carrots whole.

Make the brown sauce

  1. In a pan, melt the butter and sauté the onion and ham until soft.

  2. Stir in the rice flour and cook for 1 minute.

  3. Add the brown stock and bring to a simmer.

  4. Cook for 15 minutes, then strain the sauce.

Cook and serve

  1. Add the whole carrots to the sauce and cook until tender.

  2. Serve with broiled beefsteak.

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 + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,477 recipes

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

  3. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Carrot + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 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

Young carrots
Provide the main vegetable and body of the dish, cooked tender in the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying the flavour of the onion and ham.
Rice flour
Thickens the brown stock into a sauce as it cooks.
Brown stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and gives it savoury depth.
Ham
Adds salty, savoury flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the rice flour. Cooking the flour briefly in the melted butter removes its raw taste and helps it thicken the stock smoothly without lumps.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, ham, rice, flour):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, ham, rice, 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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