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Curry of Mutton

A slow‑cooked mutton curry with onions, butter, curry powder, flour, and cream, 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: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Curry of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter and sauté the chopped onions until soft.

  2. Stir in the curry powder, salt, flour, and cream until smooth.

Cook and serve

  1. Fry the mutton pieces in a separate pan until lightly browned.

  2. Add the browned mutton to the saucepan and simmer gently for 1.5 hours.

  3. Serve the mutton on a hot dish, surrounded by a border of 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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + buttertop 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 and meaty texture, which becomes tender with long gentle simmering.
Button onions
Softened in butter, they add sweetness and body to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the meat instead of running thin.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, mellow texture that softens the curry's heat.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice aroma and flavour that defines the dish.

The step that matters

Simmer gently after adding the mutton. Gentle heat lets the connective tissue in the mutton break down slowly, giving tender meat. A hard boil toughens the meat and can split the cream sauce, so keep the simmer low and steady.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, cream, mutton, 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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