Skip to main content
Main

Creamed Carrots

Creamed carrots are tender carrots simmered in a butter and flour sauce with cream, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Creamed Carrots

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carrots

  1. Boil the carrots until tender, then scrape and cut them into even dice.

  2. Season the carrots with salt and pepper.

Make the sauce

  1. In a double boiler, heat the cream with salt and white pepper until scalding.

  2. In a small bowl, rub together the flour and butter until smooth.

  3. Add the flour and butter mixture to the hot cream and cook until thickened.

Combine and serve

  1. Stir in the carrots until they are well coated with the sauce.

  2. Serve in crust cups or on round slices of toast.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Carrot + white peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Flour and butter 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

Heavy cream
Forms the body of the sauce and gives it a rich, smooth texture.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the cream into a sauce when cooked with the butter.
Butter
Adds fat and richness and helps the flour blend smoothly into the sauce.
Carrots
Provide the main vegetable bulk and their natural sweetness to the dish.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour and butter into the cream. Flour thickens only when its starch is heated in liquid, so the sauce must be cooked until it thickens. Adding the paste to cream that is too cool can leave lumps, and stopping early leaves a thin, raw-tasting sauce.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, cream, flour, 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