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Sauce for Fish Curry

A sauce made from fish trimmings, vegetables, herbs, and spices, thickened with butter, flour, and curry powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Sauce for Fish Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Combine fish trimmings, onions, carrot, celery, leek, thyme, parsley, bay leaves, water, and milk in a saucepan.

  2. Boil for 30 minutes, then skim and strain through a fine sieve.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the strained liquid with butter, flour, and curry powder, warming over low heat for 5 minutes.

  2. Dilute with fish broth to achieve a consistency similar to thick melted butter.

  3. Boil for 15 minutes.

Cook and serve

  1. Cut the fish into pieces and cook in the oven with the sauce poured over.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Leek + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together360 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and carries the curry flavour, giving the sauce body and a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by absorbing liquid as it warms with the butter.
Curry powder
Provides the spiced aroma and flavour that defines the sauce.
Onions
Build sweetness and savoury depth as they simmer into the stock.
Milk
Adds creaminess and a softly sweet, rounded flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Warming the flour and curry powder with butter. Cooking the flour in fat over low heat removes its raw taste and lets it thicken smoothly. Curry powder's aromatic compounds bloom in warm fat, but overheating can scorch them and make the sauce bitter, so keep the heat low.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, carrot, celery, leek, thyme, parsley, milk):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, carrot, celery, leek, thyme, parsley, milk. 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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