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Curried Fowl

A stew of roasted fowl pieces with onions, apple, curry, butter, and gravy, finished with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Curried Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the onions, peel and chop the apple, and cut the fowl into neat joints.

Cook

  1. Fry the fowl, onions, and apple in butter until browned.

  2. Add the curry powder, flour, and gravy, and stew for about 20 minutes.

  3. Stir in the lemon juice and serve with boiled rice around the edge of the dish.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

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

  3. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

Butter and flour 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

Butter
Fat that carries the frying and helps the fowl, onions and apple brown.
Curry powder
Provides the spiced aroma and flavour that defines the dish.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it stews, giving the sauce body.
Apple
Adds a mild sweetness that balances the curry spices.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, spiced sauce.

The step that matters

Fry until browned. Browning the fowl, onions and apple in butter builds the caramelised, savoury flavour base of the sauce. Pale frying gives a flat, less developed curry, so the pieces should colour well before the liquid goes in.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, butter, flour, lemon. 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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