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Fish Curry

A fish curry made with cod, haddock, sole, or salmon fillets, onions, shallot, curry paste, ground rice, stock, lemon juice, served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,523 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Fish Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Cut the fish into neat fillets and salt them for a few hours for better texture.

  2. Drain, dry, and fry the fillets in butter for five minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate pan, fry the onions and shallot until tender, then rub through a sieve.

  2. Mix the sieved mixture with curry paste, ground rice, and enough stock to achieve a sauce consistency.

  3. Boil the sauce until thick, then add the fish and simmer until cooked through.

Finish and serve

  1. Just before serving, stir in lemon juice and serve with rice.

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. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Onion + shallottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,431 recipes

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

  3. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

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

  4. Shallot + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together284 recipes

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

  5. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fish fillets
Provide the flaky protein that the curry sauce coats and surrounds.
Onions
Build sweetness and body as they soften and are pureed into the sauce.
Curry paste
Supplies the main spice flavour and aroma of the dish.
Ground rice
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the fish.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the fillets brown when fried.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the finished curry.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce until thick before adding the fish. Ground rice thickens only as it heats and the starch swells, so the sauce must reach a proper consistency first. Adding fish to a thin sauce dilutes it and can leave the fish poached in a watery liquid rather than coated.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Limefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against haddock, butter, onion, shallot, rice. 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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