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Curry of Mutton

A curry made with mutton, onions, curry powder, and broth, served over boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,433 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Curry of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry

  1. Boil raw mutton until tender.

  2. Melt butter in a skillet over medium heat.

  3. Add onion and stir until it turns a delicate brown.

  4. Sprinkle curry powder and flour, stirring until well mixed.

  5. Pour in broth and stir until mixture thickens.

  6. Cut mutton into small pieces and add to skillet, mixing well with gravy.

  7. Add sliced lemon, cover, and simmer gently for about 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve curried mutton over 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 + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + ricetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 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

Mutton
Provides the main protein; boiling first makes it tender before it joins the gravy.
Butter
Carries the curry powder and onion flavour and adds richness to the dish.
Onion
Browning in the butter builds sweetness and savoury depth into the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the broth into a smooth gravy that coats the mutton.
Broth from boiled mutton
Forms the liquid base of the gravy and carries meat flavour.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the butter and curry powder. Flour must be cooked and evenly dispersed in the fat before the broth is added; otherwise it clumps and leaves a raw floury taste and lumpy gravy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, butter, onion, flour, rice):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, butter, onion, flour, rice. 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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