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Mr. ARNOTT’s Currie

A curry made with cabbage, apples, onions, garlic, curry powder, and meat, served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

Mr. ARNOTT’s Currie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cabbage and apples

  1. Remove the outer leaves from the cabbage heart until it is the size of an egg, then chop it finely.

  2. Mix the chopped cabbage with sliced apples, lemon juice, black pepper, and curry powder.

Make the curry

  1. In a pot, heat the fried onions and minced garlic with butter until boiling.

  2. Add the cabbage mixture to the pot and stir well.

  3. If needed, add cayenne pepper for heat.

  4. Incorporate the cut‑up fowl or other meat into the pot and let it stew together.

Cook the rice and serve

  1. For the rice, soak it in water for at least 30 minutes, changing the water frequently.

  2. Boil a large pot of water and add the rice.

  3. Cook for 15 minutes, then strain and serve with 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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Cabbage + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,001 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Cabbage + garlictop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together635 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

Cabbage
Forms the bulk of the curry and becomes tender as it stews, absorbing the sauce.
Apples
Add sweetness and tartness that balance the curry spices.
Onions
Fried brown, they build a deep, sweet base flavour for the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries the curry spices and softens the texture.
Curry powder
Provides the main aromatic spice character of the dish.
Mutton or beef gravy
Supplies savoury liquid and body that turns the mixture into a stew.

The step that matters

Frying the onions brown. Onions that are only softened lack the caramelised sweetness and depth the sauce needs. Browning happens through the Maillard reaction and caramelisation, which need steady heat and time, so pale onions give a flat, thin-tasting curry.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, lemon, pepper, onion, garlic, butter, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, lemon, pepper, onion, garlic, butter, flour. 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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