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Mr. Arnott’s Currie

A curry of cabbage, apples, onions, and meat simmered in gravy with curry powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Mr. Arnott’s Currie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Remove outer leaves from the cabbage heart until it is the size of an egg.

  2. Chop the cabbage finely.

  3. In a bowl, mix the chopped cabbage, sliced apples, lemon juice, black pepper, and curry powder.

Make the curry

  1. In a pot, combine the fried onions, minced garlic, butter, flour, and gravy.

  2. Bring to a boil.

  3. Add the cabbage mixture to the boiling pot and let it stew together. If needed, add cayenne pepper for heat.

  4. Add the cooked fowl or your choice of meat to the pot and stir well.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  3. Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

  4. Cabbage + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,001 recipes

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

  5. Cabbage + garlictop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together635 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Cabbage
Bulks out the curry and softens into a tender, mild base as it stews.
Apples
Add sweetness and a fruity acidity that balances the curry powder and pepper.
Onions
Fried brown, they build deep savoury flavour and body for the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and gravy into a smooth, cohesive sauce.
Gravy
Provides the main liquid and meaty savoury base of the curry.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced aroma that defines the dish.

The step that matters

Stewing the cabbage mixture into the boiling pot. Adding the cabbage to a rapidly boiling sauce can scorch the flour-thickened base on the bottom. Keeping the heat controlled while it stews lets the cabbage soften evenly and the sauce stay smooth.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, lemon, pepper, onion, garlic, butter, flour):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, lemon, pepper, onion, garlic, butter, flour. 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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