Skip to main content
Main

Native Indian Curry Paste

A paste made from onion, garlic, black pepper, dried chillies, turmeric, ginger, and suet or dripping, used with meat and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turmeric and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,776 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Native Indian Curry Paste

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Pound the onion, garlic, chillies, and black pepper together.

  2. Add the melted suet or dripping and mix to form a paste.

  3. Gradually incorporate the turmeric and ginger into the paste.

Cook and serve

  1. To use, chop your choice of meat (beef, mutton, chicken, or rabbit) into desired sizes.

  2. Stew the meat with the curry paste, a small chopped onion, and enough water to cover.

  3. Serve in entree dishes with rice served separately from the curry.

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. Turmeric + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,776 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Clove + turmerictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,876 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Suet or dripping
Adds fat that binds the paste and carries the spice flavours.
Turmeric
Gives the paste its yellow colour and an earthy, slightly bitter flavour.
Ginger
Adds a warm, pungent aroma and sharpness to the paste.
Dried chillies
Provides heat and pungency to the curry paste.

The step that matters

Gradually incorporate the turmeric and ginger into the paste. Adding the powdered spices in small amounts lets them blend evenly into the fat and paste, preventing lumps and uneven colour or flavour.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, garlic, clove, turmeric, ginger):

  1. Eggplantfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, garlic, clove, turmeric, ginger. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes