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A Currie of Chicken

A curry of chicken with onions, apple, and butter, simmered in stock and seasoned with curry powder, flour, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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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 ↓

A Currie of Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the chicken

  1. Fry the chicken with onions, apple, and butter until browned.

Simmer the curry

  1. Add garlic and stock or gravy, then simmer for 45 minutes.

  2. Mix curry powder, flour, and butter into a paste, then combine with cream.

  3. Stir the mixture into the curry and simmer for another 30 minutes.

  4. Add salt and lemon juice before serving with 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. Apple + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Chicken + garlictop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,850 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-ethyl-2,5-dimethylpyrazine (roasted, nutty).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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 and body of the dish as it simmers in the sauce.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook, building the base flavour of the curry.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice blend that gives the dish its characteristic aroma and warmth.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter into a paste and blended in.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, rounder texture to the finished sauce.
Stock or gravy
Forms the liquid that simmers with the chicken and carries the seasonings.

The step that matters

Mixing the curry powder, flour, and butter into a paste. Cooking the spices and flour in fat before adding liquid helps the raw flour taste fade and lets the spices bloom, while stirring prevents lumps in the sauce.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, onion, butter, clove, garlic, flour, cream):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, onion, butter, clove, 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.

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