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Curried Eggs

A savory dish of hard‑boiled eggs simmered in a curry‑flavored cream sauce.

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 ↓

Curried Eggs

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Slice the onions and fry them in butter until brown.

  2. Add the broth and curry powder.

  3. Stew until the onions are tender.

  4. Thicken the cream with arrowroot or rice flour.

  5. Mix it with the broth.

  6. Simmer for a few minutes.

Add the eggs

  1. Add the sliced hard-boiled eggs.

  2. Heat the eggs thoroughly in the sauce 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 brown in butter to build a sweet, savoury base for the sauce.
Butter
Fat that carries the curry flavour and browns the onions.
Curry powder
Provides the main spiced aroma and flavour of the dish.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce.
Arrowroot or rice flour
Thickens the cream into a smooth sauce without wheat flour.
Hard-boiled eggs
Form the main substance of the dish, held in the sauce.

The step that matters

Heat the eggs without boiling. Boiling the sauce once the eggs are added can toughen the egg whites and make the thickened cream sauce separate or turn grainy. Gentle heat warms the eggs through while keeping the sauce smooth.

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.

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