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Curried Eggs

A dish of boiled eggs served with a curry-flavored sauce and rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Curried Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Fry the carrot, onions, apple, and celery in butter until nicely glazed.

  2. Add broth, allspice, mace, curry powder, flour, salt, and pepper.

Cook the rice and eggs

  1. Wash the rice.

  2. Cook the rice in boiling salted water for 10 minutes.

  3. Drain the rice.

  4. Steam the rice until done.

  5. Boil the eggs for 15 minutes.

  6. Remove the shells from the eggs.

Serve

  1. Place the eggs on a warm platter.

  2. Strain the sauce over the eggs.

  3. Make a border with the 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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,021 recipes

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

  3. Celery + allspicetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,422 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Form the main body of the dish, set firm when boiled.
Butter
Carries the vegetables' flavour and gives them a glazed browning as they fry.
Onions
Add sweetness and savour as they soften and brown in the butter.
Flour
Thickens the broth into a sauce that clings to the eggs.
Rice
Forms a fluffy border around the dish, holding its shape when steamed.
Curry powder
Provides the warm, aromatic spice that defines the sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the eggs for 15 minutes. Boiling for the full 15 minutes sets the yolks fully firm; too little time leaves them runny, while overcooking can leave a grey ring around the yolk.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, onion, apple, celery, butter, allspice, flour):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, onion, apple, celery, butter, allspice, flour. 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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