Skip to main content
Main

Curried Eggs

Eggs simmered in a buttery curry sauce with onion, lemon, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Curried Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

  1. Boil the eggs for 10 minutes.

  2. Transfer the eggs to cold water and remove the shells.

  3. Cut off the ends of the eggs to allow them to stand upright.

Make the curry sauce

  1. Slice the onion.

  2. Fry the sliced onion in butter until soft.

  3. Mix flour and curry powder with a little milk until smooth.

  4. Add the remaining milk, onion, lemon juice, sugar, salt, and pepper to the mixture.

  5. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  6. Cook the mixture for 2 hours.

  7. Strain the mixture through a sieve.

Serve

  1. Arrange the eggs on a dish.

  2. Pour the gravy around the eggs.

  3. Serve with boiled 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Form the main body of the dish and set firm when boiled.
Milk
Provides the liquid base that becomes the creamy curry sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk mixture so the sauce becomes smooth and coats the eggs.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced flavour that defines the sauce.
Onion
Softens in butter to add sweetness and body to the sauce.
Butter
Fat that softens the onion and carries the curry flavour.

The step that matters

Cook the mixture for 2 hours. Flour thickens only when the starch is heated enough to swell, and long simmering over low heat can scorch milk, so the sauce needs gentle, steady attention to stay smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, milk, sugar, flour, butter, lemon, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, milk, sugar, flour, butter, lemon, 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes