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Chitchkee Curry

A vegetable curry made with onions, mixed vegetables, curry powder, and ghee, served over boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cauliflower and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 286 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Chitchkee Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry

  1. Heat the ghee in a pan.

  2. Fry the sliced onions until golden.

  3. Sprinkle in the curry powder and cook for about 20 minutes.

  4. Add the diced vegetables and toss until thoroughly hot.

  5. If too dry, add a little gravy.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled 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. Cauliflower + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together286 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cauliflower + beanstop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 recipes

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

  4. Turnip + beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Softened and browned in the fat, they build sweetness and a savoury base for the curry.
Curry powder
Blooms in hot fat during the long cook, releasing aroma and the dish's characteristic spiced flavour.
Cooked vegetables
Make up the bulk of the dish and absorb the spiced fat, giving it body and texture.
Ghee
Carries the spices and browns the onions, adding richness and a nutty aroma.

The step that matters

Cooking the curry powder. Cooking the spice in hot fat for a long time, rather than briefly, toasts it and removes raw, dusty flavours. Stirring keeps it from scorching on the pan base.

Swap the cauliflower

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, turnip, carrot, beans, potato, ghee, rice):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Cauliflowerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, turnip, carrot, beans, potato, ghee, rice. 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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