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Curries, Potted Meats, Etc

A buttery curry sauce with onions, garlic, eschalots, coconut, and curry powder, simmered with gravy and finished with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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

Make the sauce

  1. Slice and fry the onions, garlic, and eschalots in butter until golden brown.

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

  3. Add the gravy and coconut (or other condiments) to the saucepan and simmer for 30 to 45 minutes until the onions are tender.

  4. Strain the mixture and return it to the heat, adding curry powder, flour, and salt.

  5. Mix in the cream and simmer for an additional 15 to 20 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with lobster, prawns, shrimps, macaroni, hard‑boiled eggs, or cold calf's head, adding acid to taste.

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
Break down into a tender, sweet base that gives the sauce body.
Butter
Carries the frying, adding richness and helping the onions brown.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice and aroma that define the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it coats the food it is served with.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, milder texture to the sauce.
Gravy
Provides the liquid base and savoury depth for the sauce.

The step that matters

Frying the onions until golden brown. Browning the onions in butter builds sweetness and savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale or burnt onions will flavour the whole sauce unevenly.

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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