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Curry Sauce

A savory sauce made with onions, butter, curry powder, stock, apple, tomato, optional vegetable marrow, tamarind, and coconut, served with grilled fish or steak.

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

Why it works: Tamarind and coconut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 151 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, creamy. The science ↓

Curry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Skin and fry the onions in butter until soft and brown.

  2. Add the curry powder and fry for a few more minutes.

  3. Pour in the stock, apple, tomato, and vegetable marrow if using, and stew until it becomes a pulp.

  4. Add the tamarinds and grated coconut.

  5. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve and serve with grilled salmon or steak.

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

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

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

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

  3. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  4. Onion + tamarindtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together426 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  5. Tomato + coconuttop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together511 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

Onions
Softened and browned in butter, they build the sweet, savoury base of the sauce.
Curry powder
Fried briefly in fat to bloom its aroma and flavour through the sauce.
Apple
Breaks down during stewing, adding natural sweetness and body to the pulp.
Tomato
Breaks down during stewing, adding acidity and moisture to the sauce.
Grated coconut
Adds fat and a mild sweetness that rounds out the sauce's texture.

The step that matters

Stewing until a pulp forms. The fruit and vegetables must soften fully so the sieve can press them into a smooth sauce. Undercooked pieces stay fibrous and give a grainy result.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, fish, tomato, tamarind, coconut):

  1. Mangofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, fish, tomato, tamarind, 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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