Skip to main content
Main

Curry for Cold Meats

A curry made with sliced onions, garlic, butter, curry powder, cold cooked meat, potato, apple, cloves, lemon juice, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Curry for Cold Meats

Ingredients

Directions

Make the onion base

  1. Melt butter over medium heat in a frying pan.

  2. Add sliced onions and minced garlic, frying until soft.

  3. Sprinkle curry powder over the onions while frying.

Build the curry

  1. Flour sliced meat well.

  2. Place floured meat in a stew pan and season with salt and pepper.

  3. Add diced potato, sliced apple, whole cloves, and lemon juice to the meat.

  4. Pour in stock and thicken with flour, stirring to make a gravy.

  5. Combine gravy with fried onions in the frying pan, adding more curry powder as it boils.

  6. Strain gravy over sliced meat and bring to a gentle boil.

Serve

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

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Garlic + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,517 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cold cooked meat
Forms the body of the dish; flour coating helps the gravy cling to it.
All-purpose flour
Coats the meat and thickens the stock into a smooth gravy.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they fry, forming the flavour base of the gravy.
Butter
Carries the frying of the onions and adds richness.
Apple
Adds mild sweetness and tartness that balances the curry spices.
Potato
Adds body and starch that helps thicken the gravy as it cooks.

The step that matters

Thickening the gravy with flour. Flour must be stirred into the stock smoothly and cooked while simmering; otherwise it forms lumps and leaves a raw, pasty taste. Gentle boiling after straining lets the starch fully swell and thicken the sauce.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, garlic, butter, meat, flour, pepper, potato):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, garlic, butter, meat, flour, pepper, potato. 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.

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipes