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Hard Egg Currie

A curry made with sliced hard boiled eggs, onions, butter, curry powder, stock, cream, thickened with arrowroot or rice flour, finished with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Hard Egg Currie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry base

  1. Fry the sliced onions in butter until golden.

  2. Add curry powder and stock; boil until onions are cooked.

Thicken and finish

  1. Stir in cream and thicken with arrowroot or rice flour.

  2. Simmer for a few minutes, then add sliced hard boiled eggs.

  3. Heat the eggs thoroughly without boiling, and add lemon juice 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. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Onion + arrowroottop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together340 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook, forming the body of the sauce.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced aroma and flavour that defines the dish.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, mellow texture to the sauce.
Arrowroot or rice flour
Thickens the sauce to a glossy consistency without making it cloudy or floury.
Hard boiled eggs
Provide the main protein and a firm, creamy texture in the curry.

The step that matters

Heat the eggs thoroughly without boiling. Boiling the sauce after the eggs are added can toughen egg whites and make the cream separate or curdle. Gentle heat warms the eggs through while keeping the sauce smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, cream, arrowroot, egg, lemon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, cream, arrowroot, egg, lemon. 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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