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Indian Currie

A spiced meat stew with butter, cayenne, Jamaica pepper, coriander, onions, garlic, and sweet milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Indian Currie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. Melt the butter over medium heat in a pan.

  2. Add cayenne, Jamaica pepper, coriander seed, minced onions, and minced garlic; sauté for 10 minutes.

Cook the curry

  1. Cut the fowl or rabbit into small pieces.

  2. Cover the meat pieces with the curd of sweet milk.

  3. Add the meat mixture to the pan.

  4. Pour in enough boiling water for sauce.

  5. Let it simmer until the meat is very tender.

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

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Coriander + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,474 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + coriandertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,949 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

  5. Pepper + garlictop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook, building the body of the sauce.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma that deepens as it cooks in the butter.
Fowl or rabbit
Provides the main protein, which becomes tender through slow simmering.
Curd of sweet milk
Coats the meat and adds richness and mild acidity to the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer until the meat is very tender. Meat cooked too briefly stays tough because collagen and connective tissue need prolonged moist heat to break down. Keep the liquid at a gentle simmer so the meat cooks slowly without drying out or toughening.

Swap the coriander

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, onion, garlic, rabbit, milk, sauce):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Corianderthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, onion, garlic, rabbit, milk, sauce. 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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