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Curry of Mutton

A mutton curry made with onions, butter, curry powder, flour, cream, and served with boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Curry of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the chopped onions and cook until soft.

  3. Stir in curry powder, salt, flour, and cream until smooth.

Cook the mutton

  1. Cut the mutton into neat pieces.

  2. Fry the mutton until light brown.

  3. Add the fried mutton to the saucepan.

  4. Pour the sauce over it.

  5. Simmer gently for 30 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve the mutton on a hot dish with a border of boiled rice.

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

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

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

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + ricetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 becomes tender during gentle simmering in the sauce.
Button onions
Soften into the sauce, adding sweetness and body as they cook down.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice blend that gives the sauce its characteristic aroma and flavour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the meat instead of running thin.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, mellow texture to the sauce.
Butter
Carries the spices and onions and adds fat and a rich flavour to the base.

The step that matters

Stir the flour into the sauce until smooth. Flour clumps if it hits hot fat or liquid unevenly. Stirring it in well, with the curry powder and cream, keeps the sauce lump-free and evenly thickened.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, cream, mutton, 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.

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