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Curried Fowl or Chicken

A curry stew made with whole fowl pieces, onions, curry powder, butter, stock, and lemon juice, served over boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,433 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Curried Fowl or Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

Make the sauce

  1. In a clean stewpan, melt the butter and add the sliced onions. Cook until they are soft.

  2. Add the fowl pieces to the pan and fry lightly.

  3. Stir in the flour until well mixed.

  4. Add the curry powder and season with salt.

  5. Gradually stir in the stock, simmering until the fowl is cooked through.

Strain and serve

  1. Place a colander over a basin and pour the stewpan contents into it.

  2. Return the fowl pieces to the stewpan and strain the sauce over them.

  3. Add a little lemon juice, warm up, 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 + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + ricetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

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

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Provides the meat, which becomes tender as it simmers in the sauce.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice blend that gives the dish its flavour and colour.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook, forming the base of the sauce.
Butter
Carries the frying fat, adding richness and helping the onions soften.
Stock
Cooks the fowl and forms the liquid that becomes the sauce as it simmers.

The step that matters

Gradually stir in the stock, simmering until the fowl is cooked through.. Adding the stock slowly while stirring keeps the sauce smooth and free of lumps. A gentle simmer cooks the fowl through without toughening the meat.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, 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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