Skip to main content
Main

Currie of Chicken or Young Rabbit

A curry made with chicken or young rabbit, onions, butter, flour, curry powder, and boiled water, served with dry rice.

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

Why it works: Chicken and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,814 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

Currie of Chicken or Young Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the skin from the chicken if using chicken.

  2. Roll each piece of meat in a mixture of flour and curry powder.

Brown and simmer

  1. Slice the onions and fry them in butter until light brown.

  2. Add the meat to the onions and fry until the meat begins to brown.

  3. Transfer everything to a stew pan and pour in enough boiling water to cover the meat.

  4. Simmer gently for 2-3 hours, adding more water if it becomes too thick before serving.

Serve

  1. Serve with a side of boiled dry rice and squeeze lemon juice over the dish.

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

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Chicken + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Flour and butter 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

Chicken or rabbit
Provides the meat, which becomes tender through long gentle simmering.
Flour
Coats the meat, helping it brown and thickening the sauce as it cooks.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice blend that gives the dish its characteristic flavour and aroma.
Onions
Soften and brown in butter, adding sweetness and body to the sauce.
Butter
Fat that fries the onions and meat, carrying flavour and aiding browning.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 2-3 hours. A gentle simmer lets connective tissue in the meat break down slowly, so it turns tender without drying out. A hard boil toughens the meat and can reduce the sauce too quickly, so keep the heat low and check the liquid level.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Grapefits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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

You might also like

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