Name: Carrots, Turnips
Ingredients: 1 large old carrot; Butter; Cream or white sauce; ½ cup green peas; Chopped parsley or chives; Sugar; Lemon juice

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, Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the carrot whole in its skin, or with the skin scraped off, or cut into slices, or cut into cubes.
If needed, boil all forms in one kettle, but cook each form separately for best results.
Serve the cooked carrots plain with butter, with cream or white sauce, buttered with green peas, or buttered with chopped parsley or chives.
For grated carrots, mix with sugar and lemon juice to make marmalade, or add to a suet pudding.
Use grated carrot as a garnish for salad or add to soups, heating through without extensive cooking.

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.

Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,053 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Carrot + peastop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,994 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

Swap the peas

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

Pistachiofits better
Chickpeafits better
Almondfits better
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.