Skip to main content
Main

Curried Fish Creams

A creamy fish dish flavored with curry, tomatoes, anchovies, and coconut, chilled and served with rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Curried Fish Creams

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Peel, slice, and mince the onions.

  2. Fry the onions in butter for 15 minutes with bay leaf and parsley.

  3. Add tomatoes, curry powder, tamarinds, lemon juice, coralline pepper, grated coconut, anchovies, and fish stock.

  4. Simmer until tender.

  5. Stir in gelatine until dissolved.

  6. Strain the mixture through a tammy.

Set and serve

  1. When cool but not set, fold in the flaked fish and whipped cream.

  2. Pour the mixture into moulds.

  3. Chill in the ice cave for 1 hour.

  4. Turn out the moulds.

  5. Serve with cold iced rice garnished with strips of chillies and tiny fillets of anchovy.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  4. Tamarind + coconuttop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together151 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  5. Tomato + tamarindtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together137 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Soften and sweeten as they fry, forming the flavour base of the creams.
Gelatine
Sets the strained liquid so the creams hold their shape when turned out.
Whipped cream
Adds lightness and a smooth, rich texture to the set mixture.
Fish stock
Provides the liquid body and savoury fish flavour of the creams.
Butter
Fat that gently cooks the onions and carries the spice flavours.
Cold cooked fish
Provides the main protein and flakes that give the creams texture.

The step that matters

Stir in gelatine until dissolved. Gelatine must fully dissolve in the hot liquid before straining; undissolved granules leave specks and weak setting. Folding fish and cream in only when the mixture is cool but not set keeps the gelatine from setting early and prevents the cream from deflating.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, parsley, tomato, tamarind, lemon, pepper, coconut):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, tomato, tamarind, lemon, pepper, coconut. 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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesFried FishFried Fish120 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipes