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A curry-flavored chicken dish cooked with onions, butter, curry powder, and thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and chicken 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 ↓

To Curry Chicken

Oven, in the book's wordsA very hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the onion and spices

  1. Brown the sliced onion in butter over medium heat.

  2. Add curry powder.

  3. Cover and cook for a few minutes.

  4. Add more butter.

Add chicken and finish

  1. Add the chicken pieces.

  2. Cut the chicken into smaller pieces.

  3. Thicken the sauce with flour.

  4. Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

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. Onion + chickentop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

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

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + chickentop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

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

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

Onion
Browning in butter builds sweetness and savory depth as the base of the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat that carries flavor and helps the onion brown.
Curry powder
Releases aromatic spice compounds when heated in fat, giving the dish its main flavor.
Chicken
Provides the main protein, which cooks through in the sauce.
Flour
Its starch swells as it heats, thickening the sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce with flour. Flour added to hot liquid can form lumps unless it is blended in smoothly first. Its starch then swells as the sauce heats, thickening it evenly.

Swap the onion

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

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

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