Skip to main content
Main

Chicken, Curried

A dish of roast fowl pieces simmered with onions, apple, curry powder, flour, gravy, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Chicken, Curried

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the onions, peel, core, and chop the apple, and cut the fowl into neat joints.

Cook

  1. Fry the onions, apple, and fowl in the butter until nicely browned.

  2. Add the curry powder, flour, and gravy, and stew for about 20 minutes.

  3. Stir in the lemon juice and serve with boiled rice, either arranged around the dish or separately.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

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

  3. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Soften and brown during frying, adding sweetness and savoury depth to the sauce.
Butter
Carries the frying heat and helps the onions, apple and fowl brown.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so the curry sauce clings to the chicken.
Apple
Adds mild sweetness that balances the heat of the curry powder.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice aroma that defines the dish.

The step that matters

Frying until nicely browned. Browning the onions, apple and fowl in butter builds Maillard flavour that carries into the sauce. Pale frying gives a flat, weaker curry.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, butter, flour, lemon. 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 curried chicken recipes

with Rice 4Salad 3 See all 21 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesApple SoupApple Soup33 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes