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Sauce

Curry Sauce

A lemony, ginger-flavored sauce with currants, made by simmering butter, flour, wine, water, and seasonings.

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

Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Curry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and cook gently until it turns light brown.

  3. Stir in the wine and water, and bring to a boil.

  4. Add the lemon rind, lemon juice, ginger, currants, and sugar.

  5. Simmer gently for 10 minutes and serve without straining.

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. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Wine + curranttop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,323 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

Butter
Melts to form the fat base that the flour cooks into.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and liquid.
Currants
Add chewy sweetness and fruity body to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour until light brown. Cooking the butter and flour together, called a roux, removes raw starch flavor and begins to thicken the sauce. Cooking gently keeps the flour from scorching, which would make the sauce taste bitter and dark.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, ginger, sugar, butter, flour, wine. 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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