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Curried Gravy

A curry-flavored gravy made with onions, optional garlic, eschalots, butter, gravy base, optional cocoa-nut or apples, curry powder, flour, salt, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Curried Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Fry the base

  1. Melt butter in a pan and gently fry sliced onions, garlic, and eschalots until fine yellow-brown.

  2. Drain the fried mixture on a sieve and transfer to a clean saucepan.

Simmer and strain

  1. Add gravy and any optional ingredients like cocoa-nut or apples, and simmer for 30 to 45 minutes until onions are tender.

  2. Strain the mixture through a strainer and bring it back to a boil.

Finish the curry gravy

  1. Mix in curry powder, flour, and salt, then blend with cream to form a smooth batter.

  2. Simmer for an additional 15 to 20 minutes until ready to use.

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 + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

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

  3. Cocoa + appletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together52 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 body of the gravy.
Butter
Carries the frying flavour and helps the onions brown gently.
Gravy
Provides the liquid base that the onions simmer in.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice and aroma that define the dish.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it becomes a smooth batter-like sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and mellows the sauce's texture at the end.

The step that matters

Blending the flour and curry powder into the cream. Adding flour and cream to a boiling liquid can clump if not blended smooth first, so the sauce stays silky rather than lumpy.

Swap the garlic

The recipe marks garlic as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, cocoa, apple, flour, cream):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Turmericfits about as well
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, cocoa, apple, flour, cream. 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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