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Chicken Curry with Cocoandut

A chicken curry simmered with coconut water, coconut, flour, butter, and curry powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and coconut work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 808 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

Chicken Curry with Cocoandut

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Combine the chicken and cold water in a saucepan and cover the saucepan.

  2. Simmer until the chicken is tender, then remove the chicken from the saucepan.

Make the coconut milk

  1. Grate the coconut and pour 1½ cups of tepid water over it.

  2. Let the coconut mixture stand for 30 minutes.

Make the curry

  1. Mix the flour with the butter and curry powder until smooth in a bowl.

  2. Add the mixture to the chicken gravy and let it stew for a few minutes.

  3. Strain the coconut water into the gravy.

  4. Add the chicken back into the gravy.

  5. Bring the gravy to a boil once.

  6. Serve, optionally topped with toasted coconut slices.

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. Chicken + coconuttop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together808 recipes

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

  2. Coconut + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Coconut + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,315 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Chicken
Provides the main protein, which becomes tender as it simmers in the gravy.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the gravy as it cooks, giving it body.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the curry powder's flavor into the gravy.
Curry powder
Provides the spiced aroma and flavor that define the curry.
Coconut
Its liquid adds sweetness, creaminess and moisture to the gravy.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour, butter and curry powder until smooth. Flour clumps easily if added as dry powder to hot liquid. Blending it smooth with the fat first lets it disperse evenly, so the gravy thickens without lumps.

Swap the coconut

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

  1. Coconutthe original
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Avocadofits less well
  4. Lemonfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, flour, butter. 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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