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Curry Sauce

A sauce made from onions, carrot, sour apple, butter, curry paste, curry powder, and stock, simmered and sieved.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Curry Sauce

Why it works: Onion and carrot are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 21,601 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Curry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and chop the onions into small pieces.

  2. In a frying pan, melt the butter and fry the onions until they begin to change color.

  3. Chop the carrot and sour apple into small pieces and add them to the pan.

Make the sauce

  1. Once the onions and vegetables are browned, add the vegetable stock or water and simmer until tender.

  2. Rub the mixture through a wire sieve, ensuring all vegetables pass through.

  3. Add the curry paste and curry powder, mixing well.

  4. Optionally, add bay leaves and serve with your choice of curried dish.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together680 recipes

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

  3. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Onion + appletop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,206 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Soften and brown to build the sweet, savoury base of the sauce.
Butter
Carries the frying heat and adds richness to the onions.
Sour apple
Adds acidity and body that balances the sweetness of the cooked onions.
Carrot
Adds natural sweetness and body once cooked and sieved into the sauce.
Curry powder
Provides the main spiced, aromatic flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Rub the mixture through a wire sieve. Cooked vegetables must be pushed fully through the sieve so the sauce becomes smooth and thick. Leftover fibres or lumps change the texture, and the pulp left behind is what gives body to the finished sauce.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, 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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