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Carrots

A simple carrot dish cooked whole or sliced, served plain with butter or with cream or white sauce, optionally with green peas or parsley.

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

Carrots

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the carrots

  1. Cook the carrot whole in its skin until tender.

  2. Cook another carrot whole after scraping off the skin.

  3. Slice a third carrot and cook until tender.

  4. Cut a fourth carrot into cubes and cook until tender.

Serve

  1. Serve the cooked carrots plain with butter, or with cream or white sauce.

  2. Combine buttered carrots with half as many green peas, or blend with chopped parsley or chives.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Carrot + peastop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,994 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,351 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Provide the main texture and natural sweetness of the dish as they soften with cooking.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, coating the carrots and giving a smooth mouthfeel.
Cream or white sauce
Adds moisture and a creamy texture that softens the carrots' flavour.
Green peas
Add bulk, color and a mild sweetness when combined with the carrots.

The step that matters

Cook until just tender. Heat softens carrots by breaking down their cell walls. Cooking too long makes them mushy and loses their shape and flavour, while stopping early leaves them firm and fibrous.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Pistachiofits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Almondfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, butter, cream, parsley, sugar, lemon. 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.

More carrots recipes

Stewed 95Boiled 49Creamed 33Glazed 18Mashed 18Fried 11 See all 2 →

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