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Jamaica White Curry

A coconut-based curry with cucumber or vegetable marrow, onion, herbs, and curry powder, served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Jamaica White Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the coconut

  1. Grate the coconut and add it to 3 pints of boiling water.

  2. Squeeze out the juice of the raw coconut in a mortar.

  3. Strain the juice.

  4. Let the milky juice stand.

  5. Skim off the cream that rises to the top several times to get as much coconut cream as possible.

Make the curry

  1. Put the onion and herbs into a muslin bag.

  2. Add the marrow or cucumber to simmer until tender, with the bag of herbs and a pinch of salt, just covering it with milk.

  3. When it boils, squeeze the bag of herbs into the saucepan, then remove it.

  4. Beat the flour, curry powder, and butter together in a cup until it forms a paste.

  5. Stir the paste into the saucepan with the marrow and keep stirring until it boils.

  6. Boil for 10 more minutes, ensuring it does not stick to the saucepan to avoid browning.

Serve

  1. Serve with well-boiled rice.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  4. Cucumber + parsleytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Cucumber + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,050 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Coconut
Provides the milk and cream that give the curry its rich, creamy body.
Butter
Fat that carries the curry powder flavor and adds richness to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth, sauce-like consistency.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice aroma and flavor that define the dish.
Cucumber or vegetable marrow
Forms the main vegetable body of the curry, softening as it simmers.

The step that matters

Stirring the paste into the saucepan. Flour thickens only when stirred smoothly into hot liquid; stopping to let it sit lets lumps form, and sticking to the pan causes scorching and browning.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (coconut, onion, milk, flour, parsley, thyme, butter):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against coconut, onion, milk, flour, parsley, thyme, butter. 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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