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Curry of Chicken

A stew of chicken, butter, onion, herbs, ham, curry powder, and flour simmered in gravy or water, finished with salt and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Curry of Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry

  1. In a stewpan, combine the chicken, butter, onion, parsley, thyme, and ham.

  2. Cook over medium heat for a few minutes until the ingredients sweat.

  3. Add the curry powder and flour, shaking the mixture together for 5 minutes.

  4. Pour in the gravy or water and let it simmer gently until the chicken is cooked through.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the chicken and strain the sauce through a sieve.

  2. Bring the sauce to a boil, skim off any fat, and return the chicken to the pan.

  3. Season with salt and lemon juice 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.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  3. Thyme + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

  4. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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, and simmering it gently in the sauce keeps it tender.
Butter
Carries the curry spices and adds richness to the sweated base.
Onion
Softens as it sweats, adding sweetness and body to the sauce.
Curry powder
Supplies the main spice flavour and aroma of the dish.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it is cooked with the curry powder and fat.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the curry powder and flour. Stirring the spices and flour in fat for several minutes toasts the spices and cooks out the raw floury taste. Too little time leaves a dusty flavour, and too much heat can scorch the flour and make the sauce bitter.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, butter, parsley, thyme, ham, flour, lemon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, parsley, thyme, ham, 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.

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