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Mutton, Curried, Good

A curry dish made with mutton, onions, butter, curry powder, flour, cream, and salt, simmered for two hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Mutton, Curried, Good

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan.

  2. Pound the onions in a mortar and add them to the butter.

  3. Stir in the curry powder, salt, flour, and cream until smooth.

Brown and simmer

  1. Fry the mutton pieces in the stewpan until they are light brown.

  2. Place the browned mutton in a clean stewpan.

  3. Pour the curry mixture over the mutton.

  4. Simmer for 2 hours until the meat is done.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + muttontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,781 recipes

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

  5. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, slow simmering.
Butter
Carries the flavour of the curry and adds richness to the sauce.
Onions
Form the base of the sauce, adding body and sweetness as they soften.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice aroma and flavour that define the dish.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the meat.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, mellow body.

The step that matters

Simmer the mutton gently. Mutton is tough connective tissue that needs long, gentle heat to break down and become tender. Boiling hard toughens the muscle fibres and can make the cream sauce separate or catch on the base of the pan.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, cream, mutton):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, cream, mutton. 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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