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Curried Eggs

A dish of boiled eggs served in a curry-flavored sauce with onions and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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, then transfer them to cold water and remove the shells.

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

Make the sauce

  1. Slice the onion and fry it in the butter until soft.

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

  3. Add the remaining milk, onion, lemon juice, sugar, salt, and pepper.

  4. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  5. Simmer for 2 hours.

  6. Strain the sauce through a sieve.

Serve

  1. Place the eggs on a dish.

  2. Pour the sauce around them.

  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
Provide the main body of the dish, set firm when boiled and shelled.
Butter
Fat that softens the onion and carries the curry flavour into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk-based sauce so it coats the eggs.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, giving it a creamy body.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced aroma and flavour of the sauce.
Spanish onion
Adds sweetness and body to the sauce as it softens and cooks down.

The step that matters

Simmer the sauce gently. Flour-thickened sauces can scorch or turn lumpy if boiled hard or left unstirred. A gentle simmer lets the flour swell fully and the flavours blend without sticking to the base of the pan.

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.

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