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Carrots a LA Kurrachee

Carrots cooked with curry paste, butter, and spices, served over boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and rice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,477 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Carrots a LA Kurrachee

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carrots

  1. Boil the carrots in a small quantity of water until almost done, then dry them in a cloth.

  2. Melt the butter with the sugar in a stewpan, then add the carrots and toss for a few minutes.

Make the gravy

  1. Pour in the reserved boiling water and add the brown stock to make 1 pint.

  2. Stir in the curry paste, grated cocoa nut, sherry, and lemon juice, then simmer for 10 minutes without breaking the carrots.

  3. Thicken the gravy with browned flour, then glaze the carrots.

Serve

  1. Garnish half the carrots with chopped parsley and the other half with sieved egg yolk.

  2. Arrange the carrots around a dish, filling the center with boiled rice, and pour the gravy over it before serving.

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. Carrot + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,477 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,351 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Cocoa + sherrytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Cocoa + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together93 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Young carrots
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender while holding their shape during simmering.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and giving the carrots a glossy glaze.
Brown stock
Provides the savoury base of the gravy.
Curry paste
Supplies the spiced, aromatic flavour that defines the gravy.
Browned flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the carrots.
Boiled rice
Fills the centre of the dish, soaking up the gravy as a neutral starch base.

The step that matters

Simmer without breaking the carrots. Carrots soften and fall apart if simmered too vigorously or too long, so a gentle simmer keeps them whole while flavours from the gravy penetrate.

Swap the cocoa

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, butter, sugar, sherry, lemon, flour, rice):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Chickpeafits better
  4. Cocoathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, butter, sugar, sherry, lemon, flour, rice. 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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