Name: Ceylon Curry
Ingredients: 1 coconut; 1 lb chicken or white meat; 2 tablespoons mild condiments; salt to taste; thin strips of red and green chili (optional)

Why it works: Coconut and chicken work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 808 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

Ceylon Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Grate the coconut and extract the juice.
Cut the chicken into pieces and marinate with salt and mild condiments.

Cook

In a pot, combine the chicken and coconut juice, and cook until the chicken is tender.
Add thin strips of chili if desired, and simmer for a few more 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.

Coconut + chickentop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together808 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, which becomes tender as it simmers in the coconut juice.
Coconut: Its juice supplies the liquid and richness that form the curry base.

“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.