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Chicken Currie

A stew of chicken pieces simmered in gravy with onions, garlic, curry powder, flour, butter, and cream, finished with salt and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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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 Currie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. In a pan, melt butter and fry the sliced onions until light brown.

  2. Add the chicken pieces and fry until lightly browned.

  3. Transfer the chicken and onions to a stew-pan with gravy and garlic.

Simmer and finish

  1. Simmer until the chicken is tender.

  2. Mix curry powder, flour, and butter until smooth, then add to the stew with cream.

  3. Season with salt and squeeze in 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.

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 simmering.
Onions
Browning in butter builds sweetness and savory depth for the sauce.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced aroma that defines the dish.
Flour
Combined with butter and curry powder, it thickens the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, milder body to the sauce.

The step that matters

Mixing the curry powder, flour and butter until smooth. Mixing the flour into fat before adding it to liquid helps prevent lumps, and stirring it into the simmering stew lets it thicken evenly.

Swap the clove

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

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

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