Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Soup

A chicken soup made with curry powder, butter, flour, and rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Chicken Soup

Why it works: Chicken and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,769 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Chicken Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Boil the chickens in water, skimming constantly, until tender.

  2. Remove the chickens, take out the bones, and set the meat aside.

  3. In a pan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  4. Dredge the chicken meat with flour and fry in the hot butter until browned.

Make the soup

  1. In a bowl, mix the chicken water with curry powder, butter, flour, salt, and cayenne until smooth.

  2. Combine the mixture with the broth in the pot and simmer for 5 minutes.

  3. Add the browned chicken to the pot and serve with rice.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Butter + ricetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

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

  5. Flour + ricetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Chickens
Provide the meat and the broth that forms the base of the soup.
Butter
Carries the flavour of the curry and helps the flour-dusted chicken brown in the pan.
Flour
Coats the chicken for browning and thickens the curry mixture into a smoother body.
Curry powder
Supplies the main spiced flavour of the soup.

The step that matters

Frying the flour-dusted chicken. Flour dredging helps the surface brown through the Maillard reaction, but if the butter is too cool or the pan is crowded, the chicken steams and stays pale and soft instead of developing flavour.

“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.

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipesChicken PanadaChicken Panada75 recipes