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Sauce

Curry Egg Sauce

A creamy curry sauce made with flour, butter, onion, milk, egg, curry powder, and cream, served with fish or fowl.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Curry Egg Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, brown the onion lightly in the butter.

  2. Stir in the flour and curry powder until blended.

  3. Gradually add the milk and cook until thick and smooth.

  4. Add the chopped egg and cook for one more minute.

  5. Stir in the cream and season with salt to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately, especially with boiled white fish or boiled fowl 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Flour and butter 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 milk into a smooth sauce as it cooks.
Butter
Carries the onion flavour and adds richness to the sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that thickens into the sauce.
Curry powder
Provides the main spice flavour and aroma of the sauce.
Hard-boiled egg
Adds body and a mild, rich texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually add the milk and cook until thick and smooth. Adding milk slowly while stirring lets the flour starch disperse evenly, preventing lumps. Cooking until thick lets the starch swell and set the sauce.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, milk, egg, 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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