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Curried Vegetables

A sautéed vegetable dish flavored with curry powder, butter, and vinegar, finished with mashed potato.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Curried Vegetables

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a pan.

  2. Add curry powder and stir for a minute.

  3. Pour in water and vinegar.

Add the vegetables and stew

  1. Roll the vegetables in flour and add to the pan.

  2. Stir in mashed potato mixed with curry powder.

  3. Stew until the vegetables are soft and hot.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + potatotop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

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

  3. Flour + potatotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Vinegar + potatotop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,608 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Butter + vinegartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

Butter
Carries the curry powder's flavour and adds richness to the sauce.
Curry powder
Provides the main spiced aroma and flavour of the dish.
Flour
Coats the vegetables and helps thicken the sauce as it stews.
Mashed potato
Adds body and thickness to the sauce while it simmers.
Vinegar
Adds a sharp acidity that balances the richness of the butter and potato.

The step that matters

Stew until the vegetables are soft. Stewing gently for long enough softens the vegetables all the way through and lets the flour and potato thicken the sauce. Stopping early leaves the vegetables firm and the sauce thin.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, vinegar, 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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