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Chicken, Curried

A chicken curry made with butter or lard, onion, mushrooms, stock, curry paste, ground rice, cream, lemon juice, and optional apple pulp or coconut.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,172 recipes. Both carry 1-butyl acetate, which smells fruity, banana. The science ↓

Chicken, Curried

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Cut the chicken into neat joints.

  2. Fry the joints lightly in hot butter or lard until browned.

Make the curry

  1. Add the sliced onion and mushrooms.

  2. Cover with stock and let simmer gently for 20 minutes.

  3. Mix the curry paste and ground rice with a little water until smooth.

  4. Add the mixture to the sauce.

  5. Stir in apple pulp or grated coconut if desired.

  6. Stir in hot cream and lemon juice just before serving.

Serve

  1. Serve the curry in a hot dish with rice piled around it.

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 + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,172 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-butyl acetate (fruity, banana).

  2. Chicken + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,769 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

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

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 and body of the dish as it simmers in the sauce.
Butter or lard
Fat that browns the chicken joints, adding colour and savoury flavour.
Ground rice
Starch that thickens the sauce and gives it a smooth body.
Hot cream
Adds richness and a mellow, silky texture to the finished sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich, spiced sauce.
Curry paste
Supplies the spices that give the sauce its characteristic curry flavour.

The step that matters

Stir in hot cream and lemon juice just before serving. Cream can curdle or separate when boiled, and lemon juice's acidity can cause dairy to split, so these are added off the heat at the end.

Swap the apple

The recipe marks apple as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, butter, onion, mushroom, rice, cream, lemon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, onion, mushroom, rice, cream, 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.

More chicken curry recipes

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

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