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Curry Gravy

A veal curry gravy made with onions, apples, curry paste, and spices, simmered in stock and finished with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Curry Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Mix ground rice, pepper, salt, and mixed herbs to make a powder.

  2. Dip veal pieces in hot butter.

  3. Coat the veal pieces with the powder.

  4. Fry the veal until lightly browned on both sides.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt butter in a pan.

  2. Fry onions and apples until tender.

  3. Sieve the mixture.

  4. Combine the sieved mixture with curry paste, ground rice, curry powder, and enough stock to achieve desired consistency.

  5. Stir the sauce over heat.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the fried meat to the sauce.

  2. Simmer gently for 40 minutes.

  3. Optionally, stew garlic with the meat for added flavor.

  4. Squeeze lemon juice over 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Apple + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Rice + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Becomes tender through gentle simmering and carries the flavor of the sauce.
Onions
Break down during frying and simmering to give the sauce body and natural sweetness.
Apples
Soften and dissolve into the sieved base, adding sweetness and thickening the sauce.
Ground rice
Coats the veal and thickens the sauce, giving it body and a smooth texture.
Curry paste
Supplies concentrated spice flavor and aroma to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, spiced sauce.

The step that matters

Sieve the onion and apple mixture. Pressing the soft onions and apples through a sieve breaks them into a smooth purée that thickens the gravy. Leaving lumps makes the sauce grainy and uneven in body.

Swap the clove

The recipe marks clove as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, pepper, veal, butter, onion, apple, lemon):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Sagefits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Clovethe original

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