Skip to main content
Main

Ingredients for a Curry

A curry simmered with ghee, onion, garlic, huldie, ginger, coconut, salt, coriander, chillies, and chironjie seeds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Ingredients for a Curry

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat ghee in a pan.

  2. Add sliced onion and fry until brown.

  3. Add garlic, huldie, green ginger, coconut, salt, roasted coriander, dried chillies, and chironjie seeds.

  4. Simmer gently with a little water, coconut milk, or broth until cooked.

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. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Ginger + coriandertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Garlic + coriandertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Coconut + coriandertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,039 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Onion
Fried until brown, it builds a sweet, deeply savoury base for the curry.
Dried chillies
Provide heat and colour to the curry paste.
Coconut
Adds richness and fat, softening the heat and rounding the flavour.
Roasted coriander seed
Contributes warm, citrusy aroma that defines the spice blend.

The step that matters

Simmer gently until cooked. Simmering gently rather than boiling lets the spices and aromatics release flavour slowly without scorching or turning bitter. Adding the liquid in small amounts keeps the mixture thick enough to cling to the ingredients instead of thinning out or sticking to the pan.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ghee, clove, garlic, ginger, coconut, coriander):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Welsh onionfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ghee, clove, garlic, ginger, coconut, coriander. 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.

More curry recipes

Chicken 164Powder 102Sauce 75Lobster 47Indian 40Fish 37 See all 20 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes