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Lord Clive's Currie

A curry made with onions, green apple, garlic, curry powder, stock, salt, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Lord Clive's Currie

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stew the onions, green apple, and garlic in a little stock until they form a pulp.

  2. Add the curry powder, a few tablespoons of stock, salt, and cayenne pepper.

  3. Mix well and serve hot.

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 + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Apple + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

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

  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 during stewing to form the pulp and add sweetness and body.
Green apple
Adds tartness and sweetness, and helps thicken the pulp as it softens.
Garlic
Contributes a pungent aroma that mellows as it stews.
Curry powder
Supplies the main spiced aroma and flavour of the dish.
Cayenne pepper
Adds a sharp background heat to the spiced base.

The step that matters

Stewing the onions, apple, and garlic into a pulp. Only a little stock is used, so the mixture can scorch if the heat is too high. Gentle, covered stewing softens the vegetables evenly until they break down into a smooth pulp, which gives the curry its body before the spices go in.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, clove, garlic, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, clove, garlic, pepper. 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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