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A Savoury Dish of Curry

A curry made with apples or rhubarb, onions, butter, curry powder, flour, stock, sugar, meat, cream, served with rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

A Savoury Dish of Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry base

  1. Melt the butter in a frying pan over medium heat.

  2. Add the minced apples and onions, stirring until they turn dark brown.

  3. In a bowl, mix the curry powder, flour, and a little milk or stock.

  4. Add this mixture to the frying pan along with the sugar and simmer for 5 minutes.

  5. If too thick, add more stock.

Add the meat and finish

  1. Transfer to a clean stew pan and add the parboiled meat.

  2. Simmer slowly until the meat is tender, stirring occasionally.

  3. Before serving, add salt and cream.

  4. Serve on a flat dish or in a corner dish with boiled rice around it, garnished with parsley and pickled beetroot or tomato.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Apple + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Onions
Break down into a sweet, deeply browned base that adds depth to the sauce.
Apples
Melt into the sauce, adding sweetness and body while balancing the curry spices.
Butter
Carries the curry spices and adds richness to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the meat.
Curry powder
Provides the main spiced flavor of the dish.
Meat
Forms the substance of the dish, becoming tender as it simmers in the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly until the meat is tender. Gentle, low heat lets the meat's connective tissue break down slowly and stay moist, while a hard boil toughens the proteins and can make the sauce catch on the pan.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, butter, flour, milk, sugar, meat, cream):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, butter, flour, milk, sugar, meat, 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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