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Calf's Foot, Curried

A stew of calf's feet simmered in a butter, onion, apple, and curry paste sauce, served with rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,433 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Calf's Foot, Curried

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the calf's feet by removing the bones and cutting the meat into neat pieces.

  2. Melt the butter in a stewpan over medium heat.

  3. Add the sliced onions and apple, and cook until soft.

  4. Sieve the mixture.

Make the curry

  1. Mix the pulp with the curry paste and a little ground rice.

  2. Gradually add enough of the liquid from boiling the feet to moisten the mixture without making it too thin.

  3. Stir in the meat, onions, and season with pepper and salt.

  4. Simmer gently for 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve the curry in the center of a hot dish with a border of 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. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

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

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  3. Rice + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

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

  4. Apple + ricetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,311 recipes

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

  5. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Calf's feet
Provide the meat and natural gelatin that give the curry body and richness.
Onions
Cook down to soft sweetness and add bulk to the sauce.
Sour apple
Adds acidity that balances the curry's richness and sweetness from the onions.
Butter
Carries the aromatics and adds fat for a rich, rounded flavour.
Ground rice
Thickens the sieved pulp so the curry holds together without becoming watery.

The step that matters

Adding the cooking liquid. Adding the liquid gradually lets you control thickness. Too much at once makes the sauce thin and hard to rescue, since starch from the ground rice only thickens as it cooks and absorbs liquid.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, rice, pepper):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, rice, pepper. 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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