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Meat, Egg and Vegetable Curry

A curry made with mutton, eggs, onions, turnips, carrots, beet or spinach, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and turmeric match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,776 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Meat, Egg and Vegetable Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix all the ground spices except turmeric with the butter.

  2. Cut the mutton into pieces.

  3. Clean the vegetables.

Make the curry

  1. Fry the mutton pieces in the butter.

  2. Add enough water to moisten the meat.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  4. Add the cleaned vegetables to the meat and butter.

  5. Once the vegetables are tender, remove the pot from heat.

  6. Strain off the gravy.

  7. Mash the beetroot into the gravy.

  8. Stir the mixture over heat.

  9. Add the meat and vegetables back to the gravy.

  10. Simmer until the dish is done.

Add eggs and serve

  1. Boil the eggs until hard.

  2. Cut the boiled eggs in halves.

  3. Add the egg halves to the curry with turmeric.

  4. Simmer for 5 minutes.

  5. Serve.

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. Ginger + turmerictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,776 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Ginger + carrottop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,377 recipes

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

  4. Capsicum + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,140 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Turmeric + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together871 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through frying and long simmering in the gravy.
Butter
Adds fat for frying the meat and gives the gravy richness and flavour.
Eggs (in the method)
Boiled until firm, then halved, adding set protein texture to the finished curry.
Turnips
Soften during simmering, absorbing gravy flavour and adding body to the dish.
Carrots
Soften during simmering, adding mild sweetness and body to the gravy.
Bengal beet or spinach
Mashed into the gravy, adding colour, earthy sweetness and thickening body.

The step that matters

Boil the eggs until hard. Overboiling eggs causes a grey-green ring around the yolk from a reaction between sulfur and iron in the egg, which spoils appearance and flavour.

Swap the capsicum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, butter, onion, ginger, turmeric, turnip, carrot):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Capsicumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, butter, onion, ginger, turmeric, turnip, carrot. 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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