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Indian Curry

A curry with onion, lard or butter, curry powder, stock, meat, mashed potatoes, optional Worcestershire sauce, served with rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,023 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Indian Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry

  1. In a pan, brown the chopped onion in lard or butter.

  2. Add curry powder mixed with a little water to form a paste and cook until fragrant.

  3. Stir in the meat and add stock or boiling water to cover.

  4. Let it simmer until the meat is tender.

  5. To thicken the gravy, mix in the mashed potatoes.

  6. For extra heat, add Worcestershire sauce.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled rice around the dish.

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 + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Potato + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together851 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

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

  4. Butter + potatotop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Meat + ricetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,481 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

Onion
Browned in fat first, it builds a sweet, savory base for the gravy.
Curry powder
Blooms in fat and a little water, releasing aroma and the dish's characteristic flavor.
Meat of choice
Becomes tender through slow simmering in stock, providing the main substance of the dish.
Boiled potatoes
Mashed into the liquid, they starch-thicken the gravy and add body.

The step that matters

Cooking the curry powder into a paste. Curry powder needs fat and a little moisture to bloom; cooking it briefly releases fat-soluble aroma compounds. Adding liquid too early or skipping this step leaves the spices raw and dusty-tasting.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, meat, potato, sauce, rice):

  1. Asparagusfits about as well
  2. Onionthe original
  3. Tomatofits about as well
  4. Mustardfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, meat, potato, sauce, 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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