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Stewed Carrots

A dish of boiled carrots simmered in brown gravy, sweetened with sugar and finished with parsley.

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

Stewed Carrots

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the carrots

  1. Scrape the carrots and boil them in the brown gravy until tender.

  2. Remove the carrots and keep them warm.

Glaze and serve

  1. Reduce the gravy to a half glaze, adding the sugar and salt.

  2. Arrange the carrots in a circle on a serving plate.

  3. Pour the thickened gravy over the carrots and sprinkle with chopped parsley.

  4. Serve very 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.

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. Carrot + sugartop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,211 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + sugartop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,535 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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 soften as they simmer in the gravy.
Brown gravy
Cooks the carrots and, reduced, forms a savoury glaze that coats them.
Sugar
Adds a little sweetness that balances the salty gravy and helps the glaze brown.

The step that matters

Reduce the gravy to a half glaze. Evaporation concentrates the gravy's flavour and thickens it as it reduces. If it is reduced too fast or too far, it can scorch on the bottom of the pan or become overly salty and sticky.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, sugar. 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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