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Curries and Curry Powder

A curry made with meat, curry powder, rice, flour, butter, and cooking liquid.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Curries and Curry Powder

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Boil the meat until tender, then separate the joints.

Stew

  1. In a stew pan, combine the meat with a lump of butter and some of the cooking liquid.

  2. Stew the meat for 20 minutes.

  3. Mix the curry powder, boiled rice, flour, melted butter, cooking liquid, and salt, then add the mixture to the meat and stew for 10 minutes until ready to serve.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Meat + ricetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,481 recipes

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

  3. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

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

  4. Rice + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter 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

Meat
Provides the main body of the dish and becomes tender through boiling and stewing.
Boiled rice
Thickens the sauce and adds body as it softens in the cooking liquid.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smoother, richer sauce.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced aroma and flavor that defines the dish.

The step that matters

Adding the rice and flour mixture to the meat. Flour and rice thicken the liquid as they heat, so stirring them in smoothly before simmering prevents lumps and keeps the sauce even. Stirring them into hot liquid without first mixing them with the cooking liquid can clump the flour.

“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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