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Hard Egg Curry

A curry made with hard‑boiled eggs, onions, butter, curry powder, broth, cream, and arrowroot or rice flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Hard Egg Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Slice the onions and fry them in butter.

  2. Add the curry powder and let them stew in the broth until tender.

  3. Mix the cream with the arrowroot or rice flour to thicken.

  4. Simmer for a few minutes.

Add the eggs

  1. Add the sliced hard-boiled eggs and heat thoroughly without boiling.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Onion + arrowroottop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together340 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Onion + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,827 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

Onion and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,827 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

Onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook, forming the base flavour of the curry.
Curry powder
Provides the main spiced aroma and colour of the dish.
Cream
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, mellow body.
Arrowroot or rice flour
Starch that thickens the cream into a glossy, pourable sauce.
Hard-boiled eggs
Main protein of the dish, added sliced to the warm sauce at the end.

The step that matters

Add the eggs and heat without boiling. Boiling the cream-based sauce can cause it to separate and turn grainy, and it can make the egg whites rubbery. Gentle heating keeps the sauce smooth and the eggs tender.

Swap the arrowroot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, cream, egg):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, cream, egg. 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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