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Chicken Curry

A curry made with chicken pieces coated in curry powder and flour, cooked with onions and butter, simmered in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Chicken Curry

Why it works: Chicken and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,814 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

Chicken Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Remove the skin from the chicken and cut it into pieces.

  2. Mix the curry powder and flour together.

  3. Roll each chicken piece in the curry-flour mixture.

Brown and stew

  1. In a pan, fry the sliced onions in butter until light brown.

  2. Add the chicken pieces to the pan and fry until browned.

  3. Add a little water and stew for 2-3 hours, adding more water if it becomes too thick.

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. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  5. Flour + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 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

Curry powder
Provides the main spice flavour and aroma that defines the dish.
All-purpose flour
Coats the chicken, helping the spice mixture cling and thickening the sauce as it cooks.
Onions
Soften and turn sweet as they fry, building the base flavour of the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat for frying the onions and chicken, carrying flavour and aiding browning.
Chicken
Provides the main protein; browning and long stewing make it tender and flavourful.

The step that matters

Browning the chicken before stewing. Frying the floured chicken until browned creates roasted, savoury flavours through the Maillard reaction. Skipping or rushing this leaves the sauce flat and pale.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

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.

More chicken curry recipes

with Rice 14Indian 9East Indian 5Whole 5Coconut 4Anglo-Indian 3 See all 164 →

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