Name: Coloring Butter with Carrots
Ingredients: 3 quarts of cream; 6 large carrots

Why it works: Cream and carrot are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,215 recipes. Both carry gamma-decalactone, which smells peach, creamy. The science ↓

Coloring Butter with Carrots

Ingredients

3 quarts of cream
6 large carrots

Directions

Wash the carrots and grate them using a coarse grater.
Pour boiling water over the grated carrots to extract the color.
Strain the liquid and mix it into the cream to color the butter.

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.

Cream + carrottop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,215 recipes

Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots: Provide the orange color that tints the butter when their juice is extracted.
Cream: Forms the butter's fat base, which carries the carrot color as it is churned.

“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.