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Kebobbed Currie

A skewered meat dish simmered in a curry sauce made from onions, apple, garlic, and curry powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

Kebobbed Currie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Thread veal, fowl, pickled pork, and onion slices alternately onto small skewers, about 3-4 inches long.

  2. In a mortar, pound 2 onions, 1 small apple, 1 head of garlic, and 1 tablespoon curry powder with some gravy.

  3. Press the mixture through a sieve.

Cook

  1. In a pan, fry a finely minced onion in butter until soft.

  2. Dust the meat with turmeric.

  3. Fry the meat in the pan.

  4. Add the strained mixture, 2 bay leaves, salt, and pepper.

  5. Let it stew until the liquid is nearly gone and the flavor is rich.

  6. Squeeze in the juice of ½ lemon.

  7. Remove the bay leaves.

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. Turmeric + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Garlic + turmerictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,363 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

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

  5. Onion + turmerictop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,913 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal or fowl
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender and absorbs the sauce during stewing.
Pickled pork
Adds savory, salty depth and fat that flavors the stewed sauce.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice blend that gives the curry its characteristic aroma and warmth.
Turmeric
Adds yellow color and an earthy, slightly bitter flavor to the meat.
Onions
Build sweetness and body as they soften and break down into the sauce.

The step that matters

Let it stew until the liquid is nearly gone. Reducing the liquid slowly concentrates flavors and lets the spices and meat juices bind into a rich sauce. Stopping too early leaves it thin and watery.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, pork, onion, garlic, butter, turmeric, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, pork, onion, garlic, butter, turmeric, 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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