Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Curry

Chicken Curry is a stew of chicken, onions, curry powder, garlic, broth, butter, cream, flour, salt, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Chicken Curry

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 ↓

Chicken Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry

  1. Fry the chicken joints and sliced onions in a pan until browned.

  2. Add curry powder and garlic to the pan, then cover with broth.

  3. Cover the pan and stew for about 1 hour or until the chicken is tender.

Finish and serve

  1. In a bowl, mix butter, cream, flour, and salt until smooth.

  2. Stir the mixture into the stew and bring to a boil.

  3. Serve hot, adding lemon juice before serving.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Chicken + garlictop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,850 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-ethyl-2,5-dimethylpyrazine (roasted, nutty).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

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

  5. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main protein, which becomes tender through slow stewing in liquid.
Onions
Browning softens their sweetness and adds body to the stewed sauce.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice blend that gives the dish its characteristic aroma and flavour.
Broth
Forms the liquid that cooks the chicken and becomes the base of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, rounding out the sauce's flavour and mouthfeel.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the butter, cream and flour mixture. Flour mixed with cream and butter must be smooth before it goes in, or it can clump. Bringing the stew to a boil then thickens the sauce, since starch needs heat to swell and set the texture.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, onion, garlic, veal, butter, cream, flour. 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 →

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipes