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A Dry Currie

A dry currie is a spiced meat stew with onions and greens, simmered until thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,562 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

A Dry Currie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Skin the fowl.

  2. Cut the fowl into small joints.

  3. Cut the mutton into thick cutlets.

  4. Rub the meat with curry powder.

Stew

  1. Add the minced onions to a stewpan and cook until they begin to soften.

  2. Add the meat and cook until it starts to release water.

  3. Add the lettuce or greens, and any additional vegetables if in season.

  4. Stew the mixture slowly until it resembles a thick sauce, adding liquid as needed.

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 + lettucetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,562 recipes

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

  2. Mutton + oniontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,531 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Mutton + lettucetop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together242 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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 down, forming the base of the sauce.
Lettuce or greens
Add moisture and body as they wilt into the stew.
Fowl or mutton
Provides the meat, whose juices and collagen enrich the thickening sauce.

The step that matters

Stew the mixture slowly until it resembles a thick sauce. Slow, gentle heat lets the onions and meat release juices and break down connective tissue gradually, so the mixture thickens into a sauce rather than scorching or drying out.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, onion):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, onion. 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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