Skip to main content
Main

Selim’s Curries

A curry made with chicken, veal, rabbit, or mutton, butter, and curry paste, simmered until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Chicken and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,902 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Selim’s Curries

Ingredients

Directions

Start the curry

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan over medium heat.

  2. Add the meat and stir with a wooden spoon for 5 to 10 minutes.

  3. Mix in the curry paste until well combined.

Make the gravy

  1. For a gravy curry, add 2 to 3 tablespoons of boiling water and stir for an additional 10 to 12 minutes.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Meat (in the method)
Provides the main protein, which firms up and browns as it cooks in the hot butter.
Butter
Fat that carries the curry paste's flavor and conducts heat evenly to the meat.
Curry paste
Supplies the spices and aroma, which develop when briefly cooked in hot fat.

The step that matters

Stirring the meat in the butter. The meat needs direct contact with hot fat to brown, which builds deep savory flavor. Crowding the pan or letting it steam instead of browning leaves the dish flat and pale.

“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.

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipesChicken PanadaChicken Panada75 recipes