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Curry, Anglo-Indian, Rich

A mutton curry with onion, garlic, curry powder, coconut infusion, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Curry, Anglo-Indian, Rich

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the coconut infusion

  1. To make the coconut infusion, grate enough coconut to fill a ½ cup measure, cover with boiling water, and let sit for 20 minutes before straining.

Cook the curry

  1. Melt the butter in a pan until it smokes.

  2. Add the sliced onion and brown well.

  3. Stir in the curry powder mixed with a little stock to form a paste.

  4. Add the meat and cook until coated with the curry.

  5. Pour in the stock and coconut infusion, then cook until the meat is tender.

  6. Add salt and lemon juice shortly 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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Garlic + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,893 recipes

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

  3. Coconut + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  4. Coconut + oniontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,831 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  5. Coconut + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Provides the main protein, which becomes tender through slow simmering in the sauce.
Onion
Browning builds sweet, deep flavour that forms the base of the curry.
Curry powder
Its spices bloom in hot butter and supply the dish's main aroma and flavour.
Coconut infusion
Adds creamy body and mild sweetness to the sauce.
Butter
Carries the spices and adds richness and browning to the onions.

The step that matters

Brown the onion well. Deeply browned onion gives the curry its sweet, savoury base; pale onion leaves the sauce flat and raw-tasting. Browning develops flavour through the Maillard reaction, which needs sustained heat and enough time.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, coconut, onion, garlic, sugar, butter):

  1. Mangofits better
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Cherryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, coconut, onion, garlic, sugar, butter. 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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