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Whiting, Curried

A fish curry made with whiting, onions, sour apple, curry paste, ground rice, and stock, served over boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Whiting and cream work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 135 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Whiting, Curried

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and skin the whiting, then fillet them and cut the fillets into 3-inch pieces.

  2. Dice the onions and sauté them in a frying pan with a little fat until soft.

  3. Add the chopped sour apple to the onions and cook for a minute.

  4. Rub the onion and apple mixture through a sieve into a basin.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the pulp with curry paste, ground rice, and enough stock to cover the fish.

  2. Pour the sauce into a stewpan.

  3. Bring the sauce to a boil.

Cook and serve

  1. Add the whiting fillets to the boiling sauce.

  2. Cook the fillets gently until done.

  3. Carefully place the fillets on a dish.

  4. Skim the sauce.

  5. Pour the sauce over the fish.

  6. Serve boiled rice for curry on a separate dish.

  7. Optionally, add cream to the sauce for richness.

  8. Optionally, add lemon juice to the sauce for acidity.

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. Whiting + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together135 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

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

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

  4. Rice + fishtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together270 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Apple + ricetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,311 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Whiting
Forms the main body of the dish as the fish that is cooked gently in the sauce.
Onions
Softened by sautéing, they add sweetness and body to the sauce base.
Sour apple
Adds tartness and pectin-rich pulp that thickens and brightens the sauce.
Curry paste or powder
Provides the spice and aroma that define the dish.
Ground rice
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the stock.

The step that matters

Cook the fillets gently until done. Fish proteins toughen and dry out when boiled hard, so a gentle simmer in the sauce keeps the whiting tender and flaky.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (whiting, onion, apple, rice, fish, cream):

  1. Coconutfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Grapefits about as well
  4. Plumfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against whiting, onion, apple, rice, fish, cream. 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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