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Curry, Another Way

A chicken curry served with a sauce of béchamel, lemon juice, and curry powder, topped with fried onions.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Curry, Another Way

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry

  1. Add 2 tablespoons of béchamel sauce and a few drops of lemon juice to the curry sauce.

  2. Fry onions in butter until brown, then remove them from the butter.

  3. Drain the fried onions on a sieve.

Serve

  1. Remove the chicken from the curry sauce to serve.

  2. Pour the sauce over the chicken.

  3. Place the drained onions around the dish when serving 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. Sauce + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

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

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

  4. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Chicken + saucetop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Sauce and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Butter
Adds fat and helps the onions brown well when fried.
Curry powder
Provides the main spice flavour that defines the dish.
Bechamel sauce
Adds creaminess and body to the curry sauce.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, sauce, 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.

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