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The Professor's Curry

A curry made with onions, butter, meat, and curry powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 42,912 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

The Professor's Curry

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a stew-pan, melt the butter and add the sliced onions.

  2. Cook the onions until soft, then fry them until very brown and remove from the pan.

  3. Add the meat to the pan and fry until brown, then remove.

  4. Stir in the curry powder and fry for a minute.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + meattop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Onion + meattop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,364 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Soften and brown to build sweetness and a deep, savoury flavour base.
Butter
Carries heat evenly and adds richness while the onions and meat brown.
Meat
Provides the main protein, and browning it adds savoury flavour to the curry.
Curry powder
Releases aromatic spice compounds when fried briefly in fat, giving the dish its character.

The step that matters

Browning the onions very brown. Deep browning drives Maillard reactions and caramelisation, which give the curry its depth. Heat that is too high can scorch them and leave a bitter taste, so watch them closely.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, meat. 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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