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Eggs, Curried

A dish of hard‑boiled eggs coated in a curry‑flour sauce served with cooked rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Eggs, Curried

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the rice as directed in the recipe for Curried Rice.

  2. Shell the eggs and cut them into quarters.

Make the curry

  1. In a hot pan, fry the onion in the butter until slightly softened.

  2. Sprinkle in the flour and curry powder, and cook slowly for 5 to 6 minutes.

  3. Add the stock or milk, season with salt and lemon juice, and simmer gently for 1 hour.

  4. Add the eggs and heat thoroughly before serving.

Serve

  1. Arrange the rice as a border or serve separately.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  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

Hard-boiled eggs
Provide the main body of the dish, holding their shape while warmed in the sauce.
Butter
Carries the onion and gives the sauce a rich, fatty base for the spices.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and curry powder.
Curry powder
Supplies the warm, aromatic spice flavour that defines the dish.
Stock or milk
Forms the liquid of the sauce, adding moisture and savoury body.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour and curry powder. Cooking the flour and curry powder slowly in fat before adding liquid toasts the spices and cooks out raw starch, so the sauce tastes developed rather than floury or raw.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, milk, butter, flour, lemon, rice):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, milk, butter, flour, lemon, 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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