Skip to main content
Main

Curried Eggs or Shrimps

A curry of eggs or shrimp cooked in butter, shallot, curry powder, lemon juice, stock, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Curried Eggs or Shrimps

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the hard-boiled eggs or cut the shrimps in half.

Make the curry

  1. Melt the butter in a pan and fry the chopped shallot until golden.

  2. Add the curry powder, lemon juice, stock, and cream to the pan.

  3. Stir well and cook until heated through.

Serve

  1. Serve 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. 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. Shrimp + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,931 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Butter + shallottop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Shrimps
Provide the main protein and the seafood flavour of the dish.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add soft, firm pieces that give body and richness to the curry.
Butter
Carries the curry spices and adds richness and a rounded flavour.
Shallot
Browning softens its sharpness and adds a mild, sweet savoury base.
Curry powder
Supplies the warm, aromatic spice flavour that defines the dish.
Cream
Adds smoothness and body, mellowing the sauce and rounding its flavour.

The step that matters

Frying the shallot until golden. Browning the shallot through the Maillard reaction builds sweet, savoury depth. Taken too far, the shallot turns bitter and can spoil the whole sauce, so watch it closely.

Swap the shallot

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, shrimp, butter, 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes