Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Curry

A stew of chicken pieces cooked with onions, garlic, gravy, curry powder, butter, and lemon, served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Chicken Curry

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 ↓

Chicken Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken and onions

  1. Cut up the chicken into pieces.

  2. Slice the onions and fry them in butter until golden brown.

Make the curry

  1. Add the chicken pieces and gravy to a stewpan with garlic.

  2. Simmer until the chicken is tender.

  3. Mix curry powder, flour, and butter in a bowl, then add to the stew.

  4. Squeeze lemon juice into the dish before serving.

Prepare the rice

  1. Prepare rice by washing and straining it, then cover with boiling water and add salt.

  2. Boil the rice quickly until swollen, then drain and let it dry.

  3. Optionally, add pounded blanched almonds to the rice before serving.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

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

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

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

  4. Garlic + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,893 recipes

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

  5. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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 gravy.
Onions
Browning in butter builds sweetness and a deep flavour base for the sauce.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice aroma that defines the dish.
Flour
Thickens the stew so the sauce clings to the chicken and rice.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and carries the flavour of the onions and spices.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the finished curry.

The step that matters

Frying the curry powder, flour and butter mixture into the stew. Flour thickens only when it is hydrated and heated in the liquid, so adding it dry or unevenly can leave lumps or a thin sauce. Stirring it well into the stew helps it disperse and thicken smoothly.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, onion, butter, veal, garlic, 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 chicken curry recipes

with Rice 14Indian 9East Indian 5Whole 5Coconut 4Anglo-Indian 3 See all 164 →

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipes