Skip to main content
Main

Dressed Salmon Curried

A salmon dish simmered in a curry sauce with onion, butter, stock, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sauce and anchovy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,057 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Dressed Salmon Curried

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry base

  1. Fry the sliced onion in butter over medium heat until light brown.

  2. Add the stock, curry powder, Harvey sauce, anchovy sauce, lemon juice, cayenne, and salt.

  3. Simmer gently until the onion is tender, stirring occasionally.

Add the salmon

  1. Add the boiled salmon pieces, removing skin and bones, and heat through without boiling.

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. Sauce + anchovytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  3. Anchovy + salmontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together535 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Butter + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,697 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Onion
Softens and sweetens as it cooks, forming the body of the curry base.
Butter
Carries the curry powder's flavour and helps the onion brown lightly.
Curry powder
Provides the main spiced aroma that defines the dish.
Stock
Forms the liquid that the onion simmers in, carrying all the other flavours.
Boiled salmon
Supplies the flaked fish that makes this a salmon curry.

The step that matters

Add the salmon without boiling. Salmon is already cooked, so it only needs to warm through. Boiling the curry toughens the delicate protein fibres, making the fish dry and firm.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sauce, anchovy, lemon, pepper, salmon):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sauce, anchovy, lemon, pepper, salmon. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesSalmon SaladSalmon Salad155 recipesSalmon CroquettesSalmon Croquettes129 recipesCanned SalmonCanned Salmon14 recipes