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Sauce

Indian Sauce

A savory sauce made with stock, butter, curry powder, flour, chutney, apple, onion, lemon juice, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Indian Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Fry the onion until brown.

  3. Sprinkle in the flour and curry powder, and cook gently for 10 to 15 minutes.

  4. Add the stock and bring to a boil.

  5. Stir in the apple, chutney, and salt, then simmer gently for 20 minutes.

  6. Strain the sauce, reheat, add the lemon juice, and use as needed.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

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

  3. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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 sauce as it cooks with the fat and liquid.
Curry powder
Provides the main spice flavour, which deepens as it is cooked gently in butter.
Butter
Carries the spices and onion, adding richness and a silky mouthfeel.
Onion
Browning adds sweet, savoury depth to the base of the sauce.
Sour apple
Adds acidity and fruitiness that balances the rich, spiced base.

The step that matters

Cook the flour and curry powder gently. Cooking the flour with the fat and spices gently for the full time cooks out raw flour taste and blooms the curry spices. Heating too hard can scorch the spices and make the sauce bitter.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, apple, lemon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, apple, lemon. 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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