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Curried Fowl a L'indifnne

A stew of whole fowl cooked with curry, onions, tomatoes, butter, milk, raisins, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Curried Fowl a L'indifnne

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the curry paste

  1. The day before, mix curry powder with a little milk to form a paste, then gradually add the rest of the milk.

  2. Let the curry paste simmer very slowly the next day.

Cook

  1. In a pan, fry the onions, garlic, and sliced tomatoes in butter until softened.

  2. Brown the pieces of fowl in the same pan.

  3. Combine everything in a pot and stew for half an hour, adding the lemon just before seasoning.

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. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

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

  4. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender through slow stewing.
Curry powder
Provides the main spice flavour, which deepens as the paste is cooked.
Onions
Soften and turn sweet when fried, adding body to the sauce.
Butter
Carries the spices and onions and helps the fowl brown in the pan.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and moisture that help build the sauce.
Garlic
Adds aroma that blends into the curry base.

The step that matters

Simmer the curry paste very slowly. Gentle heat lets the raw spice taste mellow and develop depth, while a milk-based paste can scorch or split if it boils hard.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, milk, tomato, clove, garlic, lemon):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, milk, tomato, clove, garlic, 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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