Skip to main content
Main

Curried Boiled Mutton

Curried boiled mutton seasoned with salt, curry powder, flour, and onion, simmered with gravy or water, served with rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,433 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Curried Boiled Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the curry

  1. Sprinkle the mutton slices with salt, curry powder, flour, and chopped onion.

  2. Place the mutton in a stew pan with gravy or water.

  3. Shake the pan frequently and let it simmer gently for 1.5 hours.

Cook the rice

  1. Wash the rice and boil it in water for 25 minutes.

  2. Drain the rice and place it in the oven for 5 minutes to dry.

Serve

  1. Arrange the rice around the dish and place the curry in the center.

  2. Serve hot with a side of mixed pickles.

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. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Flour + ricetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Mutton + ricetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

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

  4. Flour + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mutton + oniontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,531 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Provides the meat that is simmered until tender in the curry.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced flavour that defines the dish.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as the curry simmers.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and body to the curry base.
Rice
Serves as the starchy accompaniment that soaks up the sauce.

The step that matters

Shake the pan frequently while simmering. Frequent shaking keeps the flour-thickened sauce from settling and scorching on the base of the pan, so the mutton cooks evenly in a smooth sauce.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, flour, rice):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, flour, rice. 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

Mutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipesHaricot MuttonHaricot Mutton59 recipesMutton SoupMutton Soup56 recipes