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Curried Eggs

A dish of poached eggs in a thickened curry milk sauce served over buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,418 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Curried Eggs

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mix curry powder and cornstarch with cold milk to form a smooth paste.

  2. Pour this mixture into boiling milk, stirring until it thickens.

Poach and serve

  1. Carefully break an egg into a saucer and slip it into the boiling mixture.

  2. Poach the egg until it sets.

  3. Place the cooked egg on squares of buttered toast.

  4. Pour the remaining liquid around the eggs and serve very hot.

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. Wheat + milktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Wheat + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cornstarch or wheat flour
Thickens the milk mixture into a smooth sauce as it heats.
Egg
Sets when poached, providing the soft, tender centre of the dish.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries the curry flavour.
Curry powder
Provides the spiced aroma and flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Slip the egg into the boiling mixture carefully. Breaking the egg into a saucer first lets it slide in gently, so the white holds together rather than scattering. Poaching in gently moving liquid sets the white around the yolk while keeping the yolk soft.

“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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