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Fowl, Curried

A stew of fowl pieces cooked with curry powder, onions, butter, and milk or broth, finished with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Fowl, Curried

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown

  1. Roll each piece of fowl in a mixture of curry powder and flour.

  2. Fry the onion rings in 2 ounces of butter until light brown, adding garlic if desired.

  3. Add the fowl pieces and 2 more ounces of butter to the pan.

Stew and finish

  1. Pour in the hot milk, broth, or water, and season with salt.

  2. Cover and stew gently until the sauce reduces by one-third.

  3. Squeeze in the juice of half a lemon before serving.

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 + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Garlic + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,893 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Fowl
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through gentle stewing in the sauce.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice flavour and colour that define the dish.
Flour
Coats the fowl and thickens the sauce as it reduces.
Onions
Soften and turn sweet when fried, adding body to the sauce.
Butter
Carries the frying and adds richness and flavour to the onions and fowl.
Milk, broth, or water
Forms the liquid that the fowl stews in and that reduces into the sauce.

The step that matters

Stew gently until the sauce reduces by one-third. Gentle heat keeps the fowl tender while the liquid slowly evaporates, concentrating the flavour. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and may scorch the flour-thickened sauce on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the garlic

The recipe marks garlic as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, onion, butter, milk, lemon):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, onion, butter, milk, 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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