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Sauce

Curry Sauce

A sauce made with onion, parsley, ham, butter, flour, curry powder, white broth, egg yolks, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Curry Sauce

Why it works: Onion and parsley are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25,843 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Curry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter and sauté the onion, parsley, and ham on low heat until the onion is soft.

  2. Sprinkle in the flour and curry powder, mixing well.

  3. Gradually add the white broth, bring to a boil, and cook for 15 minutes.

  4. Strain the sauce through a fine strainer, return to heat, and stir in the egg yolks and butter without boiling.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce with your choice of 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 + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Thickens the broth into a smooth sauce as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and helps carry the curry flavour.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce when stirred in off the heat.
Curry powder
Provides the main spiced, aromatic flavour of the sauce.
White broth
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks and butter without boiling. Egg yolks scramble if they get too hot, which turns the sauce grainy. Stirring them in off the heat, after straining, lets them thicken it gently and smoothly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, parsley, ham, flour, egg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, ham, flour, egg. 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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