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Salmon, Curried

A salmon dish simmered in a curry sauce with onions and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Salmon, Curried

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Fry the sliced onions in hot fat until they begin to turn yellow.

  2. Mix the curry powder and curry paste smoothly with a small amount of stock, then add more stock to make a total of 1 pint.

  3. Pour the mixture over the onions and let it simmer gently for a few minutes.

  4. Rub the sauce through a fine sieve, return it to the saucepan, and bring it to a boil.

Cook the salmon

  1. Add the salmon pieces to the boiling sauce and skim off any fat.

  2. Simmer the salmon gently until cooked through, about 30 minutes.

  3. Optionally, add garlic or lemon juice before serving.

Serve

  1. Serve the curried salmon with rice on a separate 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.

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 + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

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

  3. Garlic + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,358 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Onion + salmontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,529 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Salmon + ricetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together730 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Softened and browned in fat, they build the body and sweet base of the sauce.
Curry powder
Provides the main spiced aroma and flavour of the sauce.
Curry paste
Adds concentrated curry flavour and depth to the sauce.
Stock
Forms the liquid of the sauce, carrying the flavours and keeping it moist.
Salmon
Its pieces cook gently in the sauce, becoming tender and flaky as they heat through.

The step that matters

Simmer the salmon gently. Vigorous boiling toughens and breaks up fish protein, so the pieces turn dry and ragged. A gentle simmer cooks them through while keeping them tender and intact.

Swap the garlic

The recipe marks garlic as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, salmon, rice):

  1. Garlicthe original
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Turmericfits about as well
  4. Cuminfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, salmon, 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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