Skip to main content
Main

Curry of Vegetables

A simmered vegetable curry with onions, apples, carrots, turnip, celery, curry powder, and milk or stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Curry of Vegetables

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry

  1. Melt butter in a pan until it bubbles.

  2. Add minced onion and sliced apple; stir for 2 minutes.

  3. Add diced vegetables and stir often until browned.

  4. Mix flour with the vegetables and seasoning, then add to the butter.

  5. Pour in the milk or stock, cover, and simmer for 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Serve with a border of 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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 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

Butter
Fat that carries the curry powder and helps the vegetables brown.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the liquid.
Carrots
Add body, sweetness and texture to the curry.
Turnip
Adds bulk and a mild, slightly sharp flavour to the vegetables.
Milk or stock
Forms the liquid that simmers the vegetables into a sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the vegetables before adding liquid. Stirring the diced vegetables until they brown develops deeper, roasted flavours through the Maillard reaction. Adding liquid too early would steam them and leave the curry tasting flat.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, carrot, turnip, celery, pepper, milk, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, carrot, turnip, celery, pepper, milk, flour. 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.

More vegetable curry recipes

Soup 3Stew 3 See all 29 →

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipesApple SoupApple Soup33 recipes