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East India Curry

A chicken curry made with onions, clarified butter, curry powder, stock, and served with Patna rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and chicken match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,148 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

East India Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry

  1. Heat the clarified butter in a stewpan and fry the sliced onions until brown.

  2. Add the curry powder and stir into the stock.

  3. Add the chicken pieces and stew until cooked through.

Serve

  1. Season with salt and serve, pouring the sauce over the chicken.

  2. Wash and boil the Patna rice, then dry it in a stewpan by the fire before serving with the curry.

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. Beef + chickentop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,148 recipes

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

  2. Chicken + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,769 recipes

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

  3. Onion + beeftop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Onion + chickentop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

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

  5. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Frying them until brown builds a deep, sweet flavour and colours the sauce.
Clarified butter
Provides fat for frying the onions and carries the curry powder's aroma.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice blend that gives the dish its characteristic aroma and flavour.
Consomme or light beef stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries flavour into the chicken.
Raw chickens
Provides the main protein, which becomes tender as it stews in the sauce.

The step that matters

Stew the chicken until cooked through. Chicken must reach a fully cooked internal temperature to be safe, and stewing too hard can toughen the meat. Gentle simmering keeps it tender while cooking it through.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits about as well
  2. Onionthe original
  3. Tomatofits about as well
  4. Asparagusfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, beef, chicken, rice. 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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