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Currie Puff

A puff pastry filled with spiced chicken and curry mixture, fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cardamom match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,114 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Currie Puff

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry filling

  1. Melt the butter in a pan and add the cloves, onion, garlic, bay leaves, and tarragon. Fry until golden.

  2. Stir in the curry powder and fry for a moment.

  3. Add the minced chicken and mix well.

  4. Incorporate the cardamom seeds and tomato conserve, then let simmer for 20 minutes.

Shape and cook the puffs

  1. Roll out the puff pastry into squares, place a spoonful of the curry mixture in each, and fold into triangles.

  2. Fry the puffs in butter until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve hot or cold, garnished with parsley.

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. Clove + cardamomtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,114 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Garlic + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Clove + tarragontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together548 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Tarragon + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together391 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Fries the aromatics and browns the finished puffs, adding richness and golden colour.
Onion
Softens and sweetens as it fries, forming the base flavour of the filling.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma that mellows during frying.
Cooked chicken
Forms the bulk of the filling, providing protein and a meaty texture.
Curry powder
Blooms in the fat to release aromatic spice compounds into the filling.
Puff pastry
Forms a flaky, layered casing that puffs and crisps when fried.

The step that matters

Frying the puffs until golden brown. Fried in butter, the pastry can burn before the filling heats through or brown unevenly if the fat is too hot. Moderate heat lets the layers crisp and the filling warm fully.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, garlic, tarragon, chicken, cardamom, tomato):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Corianderfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, garlic, tarragon, chicken, cardamom, tomato. 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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