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A Bengal Currie

A Bengal Currie is a mutton curry with onions, garlic, turmeric, ginger, cayenne pepper, and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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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 ↓

A Bengal Currie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Slice and fry 3 large onions in 2 ounces of butter, then remove them from the pan.

  2. In a stewpan, combine 3 pounded onions and 1 small clove of pounded garlic with 2 teaspoons of turmeric, 1 teaspoon of powdered ginger, 1 teaspoon of salt, and 1 teaspoon of cayenne pepper.

  3. Add the butter from frying the onions and ½ cup of gravy; let it stew for about 10 minutes without burning.

Add the meat and simmer

  1. Stir in the fried onions and ½ pint more gravy.

  2. Add 1½ pounds of mutton or other meat and simmer gently for 1 hour or longer until tender.

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. Clove + peppertop 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

Onions
Break down when stewed to thicken the sauce and add sweetness and body.
Butter
Carries the spices and adds richness and fat to the sauce.
Mutton
Main protein that becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Gravy
Provides the liquid that carries the spices and cooks the meat.

The step that matters

Stewing the spice base without burning. The pounded onions, turmeric and cayenne can scorch on direct heat, giving a bitter taste. Gentle stewing in butter and gravy cooks the onions down and blooms the spices evenly.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Spinachfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

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