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Currie Puffs

A pastry tart filled with spiced ground beef and onions, fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cardamom and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,114 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Currie Puffs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Make a puff pastry and roll it out like for jam turnovers.

  2. Prepare the forcemeat by frying the onion rings until golden.

  3. Add curry powder, ground beef, cardamom seeds, cloves, garlic, and salt to the onion.

Shape and fry

  1. Shape the pastry into tarts and fill with the forcemeat.

  2. Fry the tarts in butter until pale golden brown.

  3. Drain on paper and serve with fried crisp parsley.

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. Cardamom + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,114 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Garlic + parsleytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,308 recipes

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

  4. Cardamom + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together66 recipes

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

  5. Clove + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Forms the savoury meat filling that gives the puffs their body.
Onion
Softens and sweetens as it fries, adding savoury depth to the forcemeat.
Butter
Fat for frying that browns the pastry and adds richness.
Curry powder
Supplies the warm spiced aroma that defines the filling.

The step that matters

Frying the tarts in butter. Butter browns quickly and can burn before the pastry cooks through. Moderate heat and attention to colour keep the tarts pale golden and the filling hot.

Swap the cardamom

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, clove, garlic, butter, parsley):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Cardamomthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, clove, garlic, butter, parsley. 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.

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