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Curry, From Original India Receipt

A lamb or mutton curry simmered with curry powder, onions, carrots, potatoes, and parsley, thickened with flour and served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Curry, From Original India Receipt

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the lamb or mutton into pieces about 2 inches thick.

  2. Heat the beef drippings in a thick pot or frying pan until boiling hot.

Brown and simmer

  1. Add the meat and brown it, sprinkling the curry powder over the meat while browning. Be careful not to scorch the curry powder.

  2. Add enough water to cover the meat, along with the green onion, fried onion, carrot, parsley, and potatoes on top.

  3. Season with coarse sea salt to taste.

  4. Allow to cook for 2 hours.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the potatoes.

  2. Thicken the curry with Globe A-1 flour.

  3. Serve with 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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Lamb + beeftop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together896 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  5. Parsley + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb or young mutton
Provides the meat that becomes tender during long, slow simmering.
Beef drippings
Fat that carries the curry flavour and helps the meat brown well.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice flavour, which deepens when toasted briefly in hot fat.
Globe a-1 flour
Starch that thickens the cooking liquid into a richer, looser sauce.
Potatoes
Soften in the liquid and add body and starch to the curry.

The step that matters

Sprinkle the curry powder while browning. Curry powder scorches quickly in hot fat, which turns it bitter. Adding it while the meat browns and watching the heat lets the spices toast gently and bloom in the fat, giving a rounder flavour.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, beef, meat, carrot, parsley, potato, flour):

  1. Turnipfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, beef, meat, carrot, parsley, potato, 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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