Skip to main content
Main

Fish Curry

A spicy fish dish cooked in ghee with dried chillies, fenugreek, turmeric, onions, garlic, and optional vegetables, finished with acidity.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Fenugreek and turmeric match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 229 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Fish Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Wash the fish pieces with oil and pounded raw gram, then rinse the fish pieces in water.

  2. Fry the fish in ghee with salt until cooked.

Make the curry

  1. In the same ghee, add dried chillies, fenugreek seeds, and turmeric.

  2. Mix the fish with pounded dried chillies, roasted coriander seeds, fenugreek, turmeric, sliced onions, and pounded garlic.

  3. Add the fish mixture to the ghee with fried chillies and enough water to boil.

  4. Add acidity with tamarind juice, green mangoes, vinegar, or lemon.

  5. If using vegetables, layer them with the fish in the pot, shaking gently to prevent breaking.

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. Fenugreek + turmerictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together229 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Turmeric + coriandertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,253 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Fenugreek + coriandertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together236 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Coriander + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Fish
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked gently so the pieces hold together.
Ghee
Fat that fries the fish and blooms the spices, carrying their aroma through the curry.
Dried chillies
Provide heat and pungency that builds the curry's main flavour.
Turmeric
Adds earthy colour and a mild bitter note that rounds the spice blend.
Sliced onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook, adding body to the curry base.
Tamarind juice, green mangoes, vinegar, or lemon
Acid that brightens the curry and balances the richness of the fat and fish.

The step that matters

Frying the fish in ghee. Frying firms the outside of the fish so it holds its shape in the liquid. Frying too hard or stirring roughly can break the pieces apart.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, ghee, fenugreek, turmeric, coriander, onion, garlic):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Gingerfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, ghee, fenugreek, turmeric, coriander, onion, garlic. 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.

More fish curry recipes

with Saffron Rice 3Maldivian 3 See all 37 →

You might also like

Fried FishFried Fish120 recipesFish CroquettesFish Croquettes81 recipesScalloped CodScalloped Cod69 recipesBroiled FishBroiled Fish68 recipes