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Curried Cod

Curried Cod is a fish dish simmered in a curry sauce with coconut, milk, and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Curried Cod

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Remove gills from the cod and clean it.

  2. Fry the fish in 2 oz of butter until cooked.

Make the curry

  1. In a saucepan, melt the remaining 1 oz of butter and brown the onion.

  2. Add curry powder, coconut, milk, gravy, sugar, and salt to the onion; boil for 15 minutes.

  3. Divide the fish into large flakes and add to the curry along with lemon juice; boil for an additional 5 minutes.

  4. Serve with 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. Milk + coconuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,648 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + coconuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Onion + coconuttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,831 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + coconuttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,233 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

Cod
Forms the main protein, flaking into the curry as it cooks.
Butter
Carries the frying and browns the onion, adding richness to the sauce.
Onion
Softens and browns to build a sweet, savoury base for the sauce.
Curry powder
Provides the spiced aroma and flavour that defines the dish.
Milk
Adds creaminess and body to the curry sauce.
Coconut
Adds sweetness, fat and a mild coconut flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Boiling the curry before adding the fish. The sauce must simmer long enough for the spices and onion to develop flavour and thicken, since milk can scorch or separate if boiled too hard. Boiling is timed here, so keep the heat controlled.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, lemon, butter, sugar, 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.

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