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Curried Eggs

A dish of sliced hard‑boiled eggs simmered in a curry‑flavored sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Curried Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sauce

  1. Boil the eggs hard and cut them into thick slices.

  2. In a saucepan, melt the butter and stir in the flour and curry powder until smooth.

  3. Add the soup stock and cook, stirring constantly, until the sauce is smooth. If the sauce is too thick, add more stock.

  4. Once smooth and creamy, season with salt and pepper.

Finish and serve

  1. Gently add the sliced eggs to the sauce and heat until very hot.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 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

Eggs
Provide the main body of the dish, holding their shape as they are gently warmed in the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping the flour blend smoothly into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the eggs instead of running thin.
Curry powder
Supplies the warm, aromatic spice flavour that defines the dish.
Skimmed soup stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, thinned or thickened as needed.

The step that matters

Stirring the sauce while adding the stock. Adding liquid to a flour-thickened roux can form lumps if it is not stirred constantly. Constant stirring disperses the starch evenly, giving a smooth sauce before the eggs go in.

“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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