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Curried Eggs

A dish of hard‑boiled eggs served in a curry sauce with rice, parsley, and lemon slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Curried Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry sauce

  1. Fry the chopped onion in butter until soft.

  2. Add the flour, stock, and curry powder; stir gently until the flour is cooked.

  3. Stir in the cream.

Assemble and serve

  1. Cut the eggs in half and warm half of the pieces in the curry sauce.

  2. Arrange the curry in the center of a plate with the remaining egg halves for decoration.

  3. Surround with a wall of cooked rice and garnish with parsley and lemon slices.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  4. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

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

  5. Rice + parsleytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,762 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Provide the main protein; halves are warmed in the sauce and left whole for presentation.
Butter
Carries the onion's flavor and gives the sauce richness as it softens the onion.
Onion
Softens in butter to add sweetness and a savory base to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce once it is cooked through.
Curry powder
Adds warm spice aroma and flavor to the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, milder texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour into the sauce. Stirring gently until the flour is fully cooked removes its raw taste and lets it thicken the stock evenly. Undercooked flour leaves a pasty flavor and can leave lumps.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, flour, cream, rice, parsley, lemon. 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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