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Dry Currie

A slow‑cooked dry currie made with butter, curry powder, fowl or meat, onion, cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, bay leaves, and minimal stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Dry Currie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry base

  1. Melt the butter in a frying pan until slightly burnt.

  2. Mix in the curry powder and fry until brown.

  3. Transfer to a saucepan and add a small amount of stock.

Simmer

  1. Add the cut-up fowl or meat, onion, cloves, cinnamon, cardamom seeds, and bay leaves.

  2. Simmer together for 2 hours or longer, ensuring there is very little stock for no gravy when 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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Cinnamon + cardamomtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,299 recipes

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

  3. Clove + cardamomtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,114 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Onion + cardamomtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,111 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Carries the curry powder's flavour and helps it brown in the pan.
Curry powder
Provides the main spice flavour once fried in fat to bloom its aroma.
Fowl or meat
Forms the substance of the dish, becoming tender through long slow simmering.
Onion
Adds sweetness and body as it softens into the sauce during simmering.

The step that matters

Frying the curry powder until brown. Frying spices in fat blooms their aroma, but scorching turns them bitter. Watch the colour closely and stop once browned, before it burns.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, meat, clove, cinnamon, cardamom):

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, meat, clove, cinnamon, cardamom. 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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