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Fish, Curried

A fish dish simmered in a curry sauce made with butter, onion, curry powder, flour, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Fish, Curried

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Flake the cooked fish into large pieces.

  2. In a stewpan, heat the butter and fry the onion until lightly browned.

  3. Sprinkle in the curry powder and flour, mixing until smooth.

Make the curry

  1. Add the milk and bring to a boil, cooking for 5 to 6 minutes.

  2. Season with salt and a few drops of lemon juice.

  3. Serve plain or with boiled 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Fish + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,432 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Cooked fish
Forms the main body of the dish, staying in large flakes.
Milk
Makes the liquid base of the sauce and carries the curry flavour.
Butter
Fat that fries the onion and carries the curry powder's aroma.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice flavour and aroma that define the dish.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce when cooked with the fat.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and body when fried until lightly browned.

The step that matters

Mixing the curry powder and flour into the butter. Frying the spice and flour briefly in the fat, then stirring until smooth, cooks off raw flour taste and blooms the curry aroma. Adding milk to lumpy flour leaves lumps that will not smooth out later.

Swap the onion

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

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

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