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Curried Fowl or Chicken

A curried fowl or chicken simmered with onions, butter, flour, curry powder, and stock, served over boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Curried Fowl or Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fowl

  1. Cut the fowl into pieces: separate the wings, legs, breast, back, neck, pinions, and feet.

  2. Cut each piece across twice, keeping the skin on.

Make the curry

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan and add the sliced onions; stew until soft.

  2. Add the fowl pieces and fry lightly.

  3. Stir in the flour until well mixed, then add the curry powder, pepper, and salt.

  4. Gradually add the stock and simmer until the fowl is cooked through.

  5. Strain the contents of the stewpan into a colander over a basin.

  6. Return the fowl pieces to the stewpan, strain the sauce over them, and add a little lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Warm up the dish 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Pepper + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Lemon + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying the curry spices and helping the onions soften.
Onions
Soften into the base and add sweetness and body to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce that clings to the fowl.
Curry powder
Supplies the main spice flavour and aroma of the dish.
Stock
Forms the liquid that cooks the fowl and becomes the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour before adding the stock. Flour must be cooked into the butter and spices so it mixes evenly; if liquid is added to unmixed flour, lumps form and the sauce stays thick and floury.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, lemon, rice. 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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