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Curries, Potted Meats, Etc

A curry sauce made with onions, garlic, eschalots, butter, gravy, coconut, curry powder, flour, salt, and cream.

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 ↓

Curries, Potted Meats, Etc

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Slice the onions, garlic, and eschalots.

  2. Fry them in butter until golden brown.

  3. Drain the onions on a sieve and place them in a clean saucepan.

Make the sauce

  1. Add gravy and coconut (or other condiments) to the saucepan.

  2. Simmer for 30 to 45 minutes until the onions are tender.

  3. Press the mixture through a strainer.

  4. Return the strained mixture to the heat.

  5. Stir in curry powder, flour, and salt.

  6. Mix to a smooth batter with cream.

  7. Simmer for 15 to 20 minutes until ready to use.

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. Clove + appletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  4. Clove + coconuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together458 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 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

Onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook down, forming the body of the sauce.
Butter
Fat that carries flavour and browns the onions when fried.
Gravy
Liquid base that dissolves the onions and becomes the sauce.
Curry powder
Provides the spice and aroma that defines the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it holds together rather than running thin.
Cream
Adds richness and smoothness to the finished batter-like sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer the onions until tender before straining. Onions that are not fully softened stay fibrous and will not pass smoothly through the strainer, leaving a grainy sauce. Thorough cooking breaks down their cell walls so the purée is silky.

Swap the clove

The recipe marks clove as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, garlic, butter, coconut, apple, flour, cream):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, garlic, butter, coconut, apple, flour, cream. 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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