Skip to main content
Main

Another Curry, and More Quickly Made

A quick curry made with chicken or rabbit, onions, flour, curry powder, butter, and simmered in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Chicken and onion 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 ↓

Another Curry, and More Quickly Made

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the skin from the chicken or rabbit pieces and rub them with flour mixed with curry powder.

  2. Slice the onions and fry them in butter until light brown.

Cook

  1. Add the meat to the onions and fry until the meat begins to brown.

  2. Transfer everything to a stew pan and pour boiling water over to cover.

  3. Let it simmer gently for 2-3 hours until tender, adding more water if too thick 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.

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

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  5. Flour + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 rabbit
Provides the meat that becomes tender during long, gentle simmering.
Flour
Coats the meat, helping it brown and thickening the sauce as it cooks.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced flavour that permeates the meat and the sauce.
Onions
Soften and turn sweet when fried, forming the flavour base of the sauce.
Butter
Conducts heat for frying and adds richness and browning to the onions and meat.

The step that matters

Simmering the meat until tender. Gentle simmering over a long period breaks down connective tissue in the meat. Boiling hard instead can toughen the proteins and leave the meat dry, so keep the liquid at a slow simmer.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, flour, butter. 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 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipesChicken PanadaChicken Panada75 recipes