It doesn’t seem that butter, water and salt should result in carrots that taste this supremely of carrots, but they do. Their flavor is distilled and crystalline; if the color orange had a flavor, this would be it. In the five minutes it takes for the cooking pot — one of humanity’s greatest inventions, Wilson reminded me — to come to a simmer, the water gains the carrots’ sweet, root-vegetable flavor, while also emulsifying the butter into a glossy sauce. These are buttered carrots but poached in their own carotene-rich liqueur, making them the carrotiest carrots you’ll ever taste. But as I’ve learned over the year, this same method can also yield the shallotiest shallots, the mushroomiest mushrooms, the green-beaniest green beans.