Skip to main content
Dessert

Curried Eggs

A curry sauce with sliced onions, butter, curry powder, broth, cream, arrowroot, and hard‑boiled eggs.

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

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 ↓

Curried Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry sauce

  1. Fry sliced onions in butter until tender.

  2. Add curry powder and broth, simmer until onions are soft.

  3. Mix cream with arrowroot or rice flour, add to pan, simmer for a few moments.

Add the eggs

  1. Slice hard-boiled eggs and gently mix into curry without boiling.

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. Onion + arrowroottop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together340 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Onion + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,827 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

Onion and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,827 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

Onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook, forming the flavour base of the sauce.
Butter
Carries the curry flavour and adds richness while the onions soften.
Curry powder
Provides the main spice aroma and warm flavour of the dish.
Broth or stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and adds savoury depth.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, mellow texture to the sauce.
Arrowroot or rice flour
Thickens the sauce to a smooth consistency without making it cloudy.

The step that matters

Add the eggs without boiling. Hard-boiled eggs become rubbery and their whites toughen when the sauce boils, and cream can curdle or separate at high heat. Keeping the sauce at a gentle simmer or below and folding the eggs in gently keeps the texture smooth and the eggs tender.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, cream, egg. 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

Arrowroot PuddingArrowroot Pudding46 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes