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Beef Curry, Madras

A beef curry with onions, apple, curry paste, spices, stock, and brown sauce, served over plain rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Ketchup and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Beef Curry, Madras

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the onions into thin rings.

  2. Fry the onions in hot butter until golden brown.

  3. Set the fried onions aside.

  4. Cut the steak into pieces.

  5. Roll the steak pieces in curry powder and spices.

Make the curry

  1. Add the rolled steak to the butter with the chopped apple.

  2. Fry the steak and apple mixture well.

  3. Add the curry paste, stock, and half the lemon juice.

  4. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  5. Stir in the fried onions.

  6. Simmer for two hours.

  7. Strain the sauce through a sieve.

  8. Return the strained sauce to the pan with the meat, brown sauce, remaining lemon juice, and salt to taste.

  9. Heat the mixture.

Serve

  1. Serve with plain rice.

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. Ketchup + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Anchovy + saucetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Ketchup + anchovytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together479 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Steak
Provides the meat that becomes tender during the long simmer.
Onions
Fried until golden, they add sweetness and depth to the sauce.
Curry paste
Supplies concentrated spice and flavour that builds the curry's base.
Curry powder
Coats the steak and adds aromatic spice that toasts in the hot butter.
Apple
Adds mild sweetness that balances the heat of the spices.
Brown sauce
Adds savoury depth and darkens the colour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Fry the steak and apple mixture well. Browning the meat and spices in fat builds deep, roasted flavours through the Maillard reaction. Pale frying leaves the sauce flat and raw-tasting after the long simmer.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, lemon, mushroom, ketchup, anchovy, nutmeg, sauce):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, lemon, mushroom, ketchup, anchovy, nutmeg, sauce. 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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