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Mathee Bajee and Fennel Curry with Meat

A curry made with meat, fenugreek leaves, onions, ginger, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Turmeric and fenugreek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 229 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Mathee Bajee and Fennel Curry with Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Brown half of the onions in ghee.

  2. Mix the pounded turmeric with the browned onions.

  3. Grind the green ginger, garlic, dried chillies, and mix with the turmeric and onions.

Cook the curry

  1. Add the meat and water, then let it simmer for 15 minutes, stirring until the meat is browned.

  2. Slice the remaining onions and mix with the greens, then add to the saucepan.

  3. Simmer until everything is cooked through.

  4. Remove from heat and squeeze in the lime juice.

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. Turmeric + fenugreektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together229 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turmeric + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,776 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Ginger + limetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,621 recipes

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

  4. Turmeric + limetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together584 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Fenugreek + limetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together42 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Browned onions build sweetness and a deep savoury base for the curry.
Ghee
Fat that carries flavour and helps the onions brown well.
Meat
Provides the main protein; browning it adds savoury flavour to the sauce.
Green ginger
Adds sharp, aromatic heat that lifts the spice base.
Dried chillies
Add heat and depth of flavour to the curry base.
Lime juice
Adds acidity that brightens the finished curry.

The step that matters

Browning the meat in the onion base. Searing meat until browned builds deep flavour through the Maillard reaction. Adding water too early or stopping before browning leaves the sauce flat and the meat grey and steamed.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ghee, turmeric, ginger, fenugreek, lime, meat):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Welsh onionfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ghee, turmeric, ginger, fenugreek, lime, meat. 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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