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Dry Curry of Beef

A dry beef curry with butter, shallot, apple, gherkins, curry powder, paste, chutney, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,523 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Dry Curry of Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown the beef

  1. Dust the beef cubes with curry powder.

  2. In a skillet, melt the butter and fry the beef until browned.

Make the curry

  1. Add the shallot, apple, and gherkins, and fry without browning.

  2. Stir in the chutney, curry paste, salt, and lemon juice.

  3. Cook until the meat is tender, about 1 hour.

  4. Stir in the cream and serve with 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. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

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

  4. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

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

  5. Beef + shallottop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,103 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the main protein, which becomes tender through long slow cooking.
Curry powder
Supplies the main spice flavour, and dusting it on the beef helps it cling to the meat.
Butter
Adds fat for frying the beef, carrying flavour and aiding browning.
Apple
Adds natural sweetness that balances the spices and chutney.
Chutney
Contributes sweetness, acidity and body to the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, rounder texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Fry the beef until browned. Browning the meat before adding liquids or other ingredients builds deeper, savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction. Crowding the pan or stirring too little causes steaming instead, leaving the beef pale and less flavourful.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, butter, shallot, lemon, cream):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter, shallot, lemon, cream. 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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