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Curried Chicken or Veal

A curry-flavored meat dish with onions, served over boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and chicken are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,814 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

Curried Chicken or Veal

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cook and season the chicken or veal as you would for fricassee.

  2. Fry the sliced onions in a pan until light brown.

  3. Before removing the onions from the heat, thicken the gravy with flour and 1 tablespoon of curry powder mixed with water.

  4. Stir the meat and onions together 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. Onion + chickentop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  2. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + chickentop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,559 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Flour and chicken barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,559 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

Chicken or veal
Provides the main protein, which is cooked and seasoned as the base of the dish.
Sliced onions
Fried until light brown to add sweetness and savory depth to the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the meat and onions.
Curry powder
Adds the spiced, aromatic flavor that defines the dish.

The step that matters

Thickening the gravy with flour and curry powder. Flour must be fully mixed in before it thickens, or it can form lumps. Adding it while the onions are still in the pan lets the starch thicken evenly and cook out its raw taste, while the curry powder blooms in the liquid.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, chicken):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, chicken. 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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