Name: Snake Gourd Curry with Minced Meat
Ingredients: ½ cup ghee; 3-4 snake gourds; ½ lb minced meat; 1 sliced onion; ½ coconut; coarse sea salt to taste; currystuffs as per recipe No. 26

Why it works: Onion and coconut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,831 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

Snake Gourd Curry with Minced Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Scrape the skins off the gourds and remove the seeds without breaking them, then cut into 3-4 inch pieces and wash.
Mince the meat and mix with half or all of the ground currystuffs and a little salt.
Stuff the gourd pieces with the meat mixture and set aside.
In a pot, heat the ghee and sauté the sliced onions until golden.
If desired, fry the minced meat in the currystuffs before stuffing the gourds.

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.

Onion + coconuttop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,831 recipes

Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).
Meat + oniontop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together6,364 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Meat + coconuttop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together185 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).
Ghee + coconuttop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together180 recipes
Ghee + meattop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together406 recipes

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

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ghee, meat, coconut):

Potatofits better
Capsicumfits better
Tomatofits about as well
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ghee, meat, coconut. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

Fritters56 recipes

Crisp Crackers7 recipes

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Snake Gourd Curry with Minced Meat