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Kabobs, Beef

Beef kabobs seasoned with ginger, onion, garlic, curry powder, and lemon, fried in butter and served with boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Kabobs, Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Cut the steak into thin pieces, about 2 inches wide and 6 inches long.

  2. Rub each piece with the juice of green ginger.

Season and skewer

  1. In a bowl, mix the chopped onion, minced garlic, pounded cloves, curry powder, and salt.

  2. Spread some of the mixture on each piece of meat, roll them up, and thread onto skewers.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the skewers in butter for about 10 minutes.

  2. Remove the skewers and serve with a gravy or thin brown sauce, adding a few drops of lemon juice.

  3. Serve with boiled 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. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Ginger + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Ginger + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,595 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Steak
Provides the main meat that becomes tender and browned when fried.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma and flavour that mellows and sweetens with cooking.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and moisture to the spiced coating on the meat.
Butter
Conducts heat for frying and adds richness and browning to the surface.
Curry powder
Contributes warm aromatic spice that coats the meat during frying.

The step that matters

Frying the skewers in butter. Meat rolled around a spiced paste can burn on the outside before the inside cooks through. Frying over moderate heat and turning the skewers lets the surface brown while the centre cooks evenly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, onion, garlic, clove, butter, rice. 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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