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Selim’s Curries.

A curry made with chicken or other meats, butter, curry paste, and optional boiling water for gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Chicken and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,902 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Selim’s Curries.

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan over medium heat.

  2. Add the meat and stir well with a wooden spoon.

  3. Mix in the curry paste thoroughly and stir for 5 to 10 minutes until cooked.

  4. For a gravy curry, add 2 to 3 tablespoons of boiling water after mixing in the paste, and stir for an additional 10 to 12 minutes.

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. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Meat (in the method)
Provides the protein that is cooked through and becomes tender in the spiced fat.
Curry paste
Supplies the spices and aromatics that flavour the dish as it cooks in the butter.
Butter
Carries the spices and adds richness, helping them bloom and coat the meat.

The step that matters

Cooking the curry paste in the butter. Stirring the paste thoroughly in hot fat blooms its spices and removes raw, harsh notes. Stopping too early leaves the paste tasting raw, while the meat can scorch if the heat is too high.

“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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