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Beef Curry, Madras

A beef curry with onions, apple, curry paste, spices, stock, and brown sauce, served over plain rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Ketchup and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Beef Curry, Madras

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut onions into thin rings and fry them in hot butter until golden brown.

  2. Set aside the fried onions.

  3. Cut steak into pieces.

  4. Roll the steak pieces in curry powder and spices.

Make the curry

  1. Add the steak pieces to the butter with the chopped apple and fry them well.

  2. Add curry paste and stock along with half the lemon juice.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil and stir in the onions.

  4. Simmer for two hours.

  5. Strain the sauce through a sieve.

  6. Return the sauce to the pan with the meat, brown sauce, remaining lemon juice, and salt to taste.

Serve

  1. Heat and serve with plain 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. Ketchup + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Anchovy + saucetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Ketchup + anchovytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together479 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  5. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Steak
Provides the meat that becomes tender during the long, slow simmer.
Onions
Fried until golden, they add sweetness and body to the sauce.
Curry paste
Concentrates the spice flavour and aroma into the sauce.
Brown sauce
Adds depth, colour and savoury richness to the finished sauce.
Stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavours and thins the sauce.

The step that matters

Frying the steak pieces well. Browning the meat in hot butter builds deep, savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction. Meat left pale and steamed tastes flat, and that flavour carries into the simmered sauce.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, lemon, mushroom, ketchup, anchovy, nutmeg, sauce):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, lemon, mushroom, ketchup, anchovy, nutmeg, sauce. 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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