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Sauce

Cold Curry Sauce

A cold sauce made from hard‑boiled egg yolks, olive oil, curry powder, cayenne pepper, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Cold Curry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Pound the hard-boiled yolks of six eggs in a bowl.

  2. Gradually add ½ cup of olive oil while mixing.

  3. Stir in 2 teaspoons of strong curry powder and ¼ teaspoon of Cayenne pepper.

  4. Add lemon juice until the sauce reaches a consistency that can pass through a fine sieve.

Variation

  1. For a variation, replace curry powder with saffron and use more olive oil for moisture.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Olive + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Olive + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,263 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Egg + olivetop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,340 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Egg yolks
Emulsify with the oil and thicken the sauce into a smooth, rich base.
Olive oil
Adds fat and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, silky texture.
Curry powder
Provides the main spiced flavour that defines the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and adjusts the sauce's consistency.

The step that matters

Adding the olive oil gradually while mixing. Egg yolks can only hold oil in a stable emulsion if it is added slowly while mixing. Adding it too fast can cause the sauce to split and turn greasy and loose.

“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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