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Curried Fowl

A stew of fowl pieces cooked with onions, garlic, butter, curry powder, flour, and apple, finished with lemon juice and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wipe the fowl pieces thoroughly dry.

  2. In a frying pan, combine onions, garlic, and butter; sprinkle with curry powder and fry until brown.

  3. Transfer the fried mixture to a stew pan and add the fowl.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix flour with water to make a smooth paste, then stir it into the frying pan, adding more water or stock as needed.

  2. Strain the sauce over the fowl, add lemon juice, salt, and cayenne pepper.

  3. Add the apple to the stew pan, cover, and cook slowly for 1 hour, shaking occasionally.

  4. Before serving, mix a teaspoon of curry powder with a little water or stock and taste for 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  3. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Clove + appletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 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
Provides the meat that is braised slowly until tender in the sauce.
Onions
Soften and brown in butter, building sweetness and savory depth in the base.
Butter
Carries the curry powder's flavour and browns the onions, adding richness.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce that clings to the fowl.
Curry powder
Supplies the main spiced aroma, and frying it briefly in fat deepens its flavour.
Apple
Adds mild sweetness and body that balances the heat of the curry.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour paste into the frying pan. Flour lumps form if it is added as dry powder or without smoothing it into a paste first. A smooth paste thickens the sauce evenly once liquid is added and heated.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, clove, garlic, butter, flour, lemon, pepper. 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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