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Chicken Currie

A stew of chicken, onions, garlic, and curry seasoned with butter, flour, and cream, finished with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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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 Currie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the curry

  1. Fry sliced onions in butter until light brown.

  2. Add chicken pieces and garlic to the pan.

  3. Pour in the gravy and simmer until the chicken is tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Mix curry powder, flour, and butter until smooth.

  2. Add the mixture to the stew with cream and salt.

  3. Squeeze in lemon juice just 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. 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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  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 savory base for the stew.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice aroma that defines the dish.
Flour
Thickens the mixture with the butter so the sauce becomes smooth and body-rich.
Cream
Adds richness and softens the sharpness of the spices.

The step that matters

Mixing the curry powder, flour, and butter until smooth. Cooking flour in fat as a roux before adding it to liquid helps prevent lumps and lets the raw flour taste cook off. Lumps form if the paste is added unevenly, so it should be fully blended first.

Swap the clove

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

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

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