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Haricot Bean Currie

A curry of haricot beans with onion, garlic, butter, curry powder, tomato pulp, spices, and lemon peel, served with fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Haricot Bean Currie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the beans until soft, then drain and set aside.

Make the curry

  1. Fry the onion and garlic in butter until golden brown.

  2. Add curry powder, tomato pulp, cinnamon stick, mace, and lemon peel to the pan and mix well.

  3. Season with Nepal pepper, salt, and tarragon vinegar to taste.

  4. Add the beans to the mixture and warm everything through.

Serve

  1. Serve decorated with fried bread slices and lemon slices.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Beans + tomatotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,713 recipes

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

  4. Garlic + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  5. Beans + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,935 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Beans
Provide the bulk of the dish and a soft, tender body once boiled.
Butter
Carries the flavour of the aromatics and helps the onion and garlic brown.
Onion
Builds a sweet, savoury base as it browns in the fat.
Curry powder
Supplies the main spice flavour and aroma of the curry.
Tomato pulp
Adds acidity, body and moisture that form the sauce.

The step that matters

Frying the onion and garlic in butter until golden brown. Browning builds deep, savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction; pale onion makes the curry taste flat, while over-darkened onion turns bitter.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, onion, clove, garlic, butter, tomato, cinnamon):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, onion, clove, garlic, butter, tomato, cinnamon. 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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