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Curried Chicken

A curry-flavored chicken dish with onions, apple, butter, and gravy, served over boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Curried Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry

  1. Fry the onions and apple in butter until browned.

  2. Add curry powder, flour, sugar, gravy, salt, and pepper; mix well.

  3. Add sliced cold roast chicken and simmer for 15 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in lemon juice and serve with boiled 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.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Soften and brown to build the sweet, savory base of the sauce.
Apple
Adds natural sweetness and body that softens into the sauce as it cooks.
Butter
Carries the curry spices and adds richness while the onions brown.
Curry powder
Provides the main spiced aroma and flavor of the dish.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so the sauce clings to the chicken and rice.
Gravy
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries its savory flavor.

The step that matters

Frying the onions and apple until browned. Browning builds deep flavor through the Maillard reaction and caramelization. Pale, underbrowned onions give a flat, sweet-tasting sauce, so cook until they are truly golden brown before adding liquid.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, butter, flour, sugar, pepper, lemon, rice):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, butter, flour, sugar, pepper, lemon, rice. 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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