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Curry Chicken

A stew of chicken joints simmered with butter, onion, parsley, curry powder, and cream, served over plain rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 469 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Curry Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter and sauté the onion and parsley until soft.

  2. Add the chicken joints and water, then let it stew slowly until the chicken is nearly cooked.

  3. Skim the grease from the top of the pot and set it aside.

  4. Pour the cream into the stew and mix the reserved grease with the flour.

  5. Once the chicken begins to boil again, add the flour mixture, curry powder, and salt. Cook until thickened.

Serve

  1. Boil plain rice in a separate pot.

  2. To serve, place the curry chicken in the center of a platter and surround it with boiled rice. Garnish with watercress and parsley.

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. Parsley + watercresstop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together469 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Flour + watercresstop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together340 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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

Young chickens
Provide the main protein, which becomes tender through slow stewing in liquid.
Butter
Carries the onion and parsley flavour and enriches the base of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the reserved fat and cream.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, creamier texture to the sauce.
Curry powder
Provides the spiced aroma that defines the dish.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture. Flour mixed with fat before it goes into liquid helps prevent lumps, and the sauce must be brought back to a boil so the starch swells and thickens fully.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, butter, onion, cream, flour, rice, watercress):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Turmericfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

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