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Curried Lamb

Curried lamb is a stew of lamb pieces simmered with onion, coconut, apple, curry powder, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Curried Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lamb

  1. Remove the bones from the lamb and cut it into 1‑inch squares.

  2. Heat the butter in a pan and fry the lamb until browned.

  3. Remove the lamb and fry the chopped onion in the same pan.

Make the curry

  1. Add the curry powder, grated coconut, minced apple, sugar, stock, and milk to the onions.

  2. Return the lamb to the pan and simmer slowly for 30 minutes.

  3. Remove excess fat, then add salt and lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Serve the lamb in a pile with the sauce poured around it, alongside a dish of curry rice.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + coconuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,648 recipes

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

  3. Milk + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  4. Butter + coconuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  5. Coconut + appletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together274 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylethanol (rose, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb
Provides the main meat, which browns in butter and becomes tender during slow simmering.
Butter
Fat for frying that browns the lamb and carries the curry flavours.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softens the sharp edges of the curry powder in the sauce.
Onion
Softens and sweetens as it fries, forming the base flavour of the sauce.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice aroma and flavour that define the dish.
Coconut
Adds sweetness, body and a subtle nutty flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmering the lamb slowly. A gentle simmer lets the connective tissue in the neck break down slowly, making the meat tender. Boiling hard toughens the muscle fibres and can reduce the sauce too quickly, so keep the heat low.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, butter, milk, sugar, coconut, lemon, apple):

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, butter, milk, sugar, coconut, lemon, apple. 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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