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Curried Eggs

Eggs simmered in a curry-flavored gravy served over boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Curried Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the hard-boiled eggs thickly with a sharp knife.

  2. If using soup stock, stew an onion in it, then strain and thicken with brown flour.

Make the curry

  1. Heat the gravy to boiling and stir in the curry powder.

  2. Gently add the sliced eggs, ensuring they do not break.

  3. Simmer for 15 minutes until heated through.

Serve

  1. Turn out into a deep dish and 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. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

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

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + ricetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + ricetop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,350 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Hard-boiled eggs
Form the main body of the dish and provide its protein-rich substance.
Gravy
Supplies the liquid base and moisture that carries the curry flavour.
Curry powder
Adds aroma and warm spiced flavour to the sauce.
Brown flour
Thickens the stock so the sauce coats the eggs.

The step that matters

Adding the sliced eggs. Hard-boiled egg slices are fragile and break easily when stirred or boiled hard. Adding them gently to a gently simmering sauce keeps them whole and prevents the whites from becoming rubbery.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, flour, rice):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Welsh onionfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour, 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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