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Chicken Curry

A chicken curry with onions, curry powder, garlic, broth, butter, cream, flour, salt, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Chicken Curry

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 Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry

  1. Fry the chicken joints and sliced onions in a pan until browned.

  2. Add curry powder and garlic.

  3. Cover with broth.

  4. Simmer until the chicken is tender, about 1 hour.

Finish and serve

  1. Mix butter, cream, flour, and salt in a bowl until smooth.

  2. Stir the mixture into the curry.

  3. Bring to a boil.

  4. Add lemon juice before serving.

  5. Serve hot.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 through long simmering in the broth.
Onions
Browning builds savory sweetness and depth as they cook in the pan.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded fat to the finished sauce.
Cream
Adds moisture and body, mellowing the sauce's sharpness.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it is stirred into the hot curry.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter-cream-flour mixture into the curry. Flour mixed smooth first and stirred in gradually keeps it from clumping. Bringing the sauce to a boil then thickens the flour's starch, so the sauce turns silky rather than lumpy.

Swap the clove

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

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

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