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A Dry Currie

A dry curry made with fowl or veal, onions, butter, curry powder, cayenne, salt, milk, water, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

A Dry Currie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Melt the butter in a pan.

  2. Fry the minced onions until soft, then drain them.

  3. Add the fowl or veal to the pan and dust with curry powder and cayenne pepper.

Stew and finish

  1. Transfer the meat and onions to a stew pan, add salt, milk, and water.

  2. Cover the pan and let it stew until the meat is tender.

  3. Ten minutes before serving, stir in the lemon juice.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl or veal
Provides the main protein, which becomes tender through slow stewing in liquid.
Butter
Carries the curry powder and cayenne and adds richness to the frying stage.
Milk
Adds creaminess and a mild sweetness that softens the spice sharpness in the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the spiced stew.

The step that matters

Cover and stew until the meat is tender. Gentle, covered simmering in liquid breaks down the connective tissue in joints of fowl or veal. Too much heat or too short a time leaves the meat tough, and the milk can curdle if it boils hard.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, butter, pepper, milk, lemon):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, pepper, milk, lemon. 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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