Garlic and ginger are a staple in South Asian meat (chicken, beef, goat, lamb, duck, etc.) curries.
I am just wondering, why.
What attributes of garlic and ginger made them essential ingredients for meat curry?
What do they actually improve in meat? Do they remove meaty smell?
Ginger can potentially tenderize meat. But the ginger in curries is generally cooked before even adding the meat, which would destroy the enzymes responsible for doing anything like that.
It's commonly held that that ginger (and, less commonly, garlic) mask the smell of raw meat. It would be difficult to draw a principled distinction between "A masks the aroma of B" and "A and B taste good together": As far as I know, ginger and garlic do not chemically react with the undesirable flavor compounds in meat. And in something like a curry, you'd expect the other flavorings (particularly turmeric and cumin, common in curries) to suffice for that even if the ginger and garlic weren't there.*
Finally, the ginger/garlic combination is found in many Asian cuisines: South Indian, North Indian, Thai, Cantonese, Korean, etc., often in meat-free dishes. So whatever other reasons one might have for using these ingredients, clearly they're widely considered to simply taste good together, including in meat curry.
* I'd note that one published paper takes an evolutionary perspective and argues that covering up the aroma of foul-smelling meat would not be a reason that people use strong-smelling flavorings, simply because eating foul-smelling meat is a bad idea even if you cover up the smell. I'm not particularly convinced by their reasoning, though: it seems rather hastily teleological.
