Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Currie

A stew of chicken pieces cooked with onions, butter, gravy, garlic, curry powder, flour, cream, and lemon, served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 base

  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 to a stewpan and add gravy and garlic.

  4. Simmer until the chicken is tender.

Finish and serve

  1. In a bowl, mix curry powder, flour, and butter until smooth.

  2. Add this mixture and cream to the stew and season with salt.

  3. Before serving, squeeze in lemon juice 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. 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; simmering until tender makes the meat soft and juicy.
Onions
Frying them until light brown builds sweetness and savoury depth for the sauce.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced aroma and flavour that defines the dish.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so the sauce clings to the chicken.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, mellower sauce texture.

The step that matters

Mixing the curry paste into the stew. Curry powder mixed with flour and butter must be smooth before it goes in, or it will form lumps and uneven pockets of spice. Blending it first lets the flour thicken the gravy evenly and the spices disperse through the sauce.

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.

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