Skip to main content
Main

Cooking the Curry Stuff

A quick curry sauce made with shallots, garlic, curry powder, paste, broth, and optional ground rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Shallot and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,000 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cooking the Curry Stuff

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat the beef dripping or butter in a stew-pan over low heat.

  2. Add the minced shallots or onion and garlic, frying until they turn yellow-brown.

  3. Stir in the curry powder and curry paste (or extra powder) and cook for 7 minutes, adding more butter if needed.

  4. Gradually moisten the mixture with the broth.

  5. For a thicker sauce, stir in the ground 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 + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Shallot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Shallot + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together284 recipes

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

  4. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Beef + ricetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,265 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Shallots or mild onion
Softens and sweetens as it fries, forming the flavour base of the sauce.
Curry powder
Provides the main spice flavour, which deepens when cooked briefly in fat.
Beef dripping or butter
Carries the spices and conducts heat, helping them bloom and stopping them scorching.
Broth
Adds liquid that turns the spiced fat into a pourable sauce.
Ground rice
Thickens the sauce as its starch absorbs liquid and swells during simmering.

The step that matters

Cooking the curry powder and paste. Spices can scorch in fat over heat, turning bitter. Keeping the heat low and stirring while they cook releases their aroma without burning. Adding more fat helps them toast evenly.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shallot, beef, garlic, rice, sauce):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, beef, garlic, rice, sauce. 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.

More curry sauce recipes

Macaroni in 5Indian 4 See all 75 →

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipes