Skip to main content
Main

Doremal Curry Made of Brinjals

A curry of young brinjals cooked with onions, ghee, jaggery, tamarind, and curry spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and tamarind match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 426 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Doremal Curry Made of Brinjals

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown

  1. Cut the onions.

  2. Brown them in the ghee.

  3. Add the curry spices and salt. Brown well.

  4. Parboil the brinjals before using.

Simmer in the sherbet

  1. Add the brinjals to the mixture.

  2. Make a sherbet with the jaggery and tamarind.

  3. Add the sherbet to the pot.

  4. Allow to simmer until reduced to a proper consistency.

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 + tamarindtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together426 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Ghee + tamarindtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106 recipes

    Shared aroma: maltol (caramel, sweet).

  3. Onion + gheetop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,310 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Brinjals
Form the body of the curry, becoming tender as they simmer in the sauce.
Onions
Browning in ghee builds a savoury, sweet base for the sauce.
Ghee
Fat that carries the curry spices and helps the onions brown.
Jaggery
Adds sweetness and depth that balances the sourness of the tamarind.
Tamarind
Supplies sourness and acidity that brightens the curry.

The step that matters

Allow to simmer until reduced to a proper consistency. Simmering evaporates water and concentrates the sauce, so it thickens and the flavours deepen. Stopping too early leaves it thin and watery, while overcooking can make it sticky and dull the balance of sweet and sour.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ghee, tamarind. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes