Skip to main content
Main

Curried Chickens

A stew of chicken pieces simmered with onion, garlic, white gravy, curry powder, flour, butter, cream, and lemon, served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Curried Chickens

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry

  1. Combine the chicken pieces, sliced onion, garlic, and white gravy in a stewpan.

  2. Simmer until the chicken is tender.

  3. Mix curry powder and flour with butter until smooth, then add to the stewpan.

  4. Stir in cream and salt twenty minutes before serving.

Serve

  1. Squeeze lemon juice into the dish and serve with rice around it.

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. Garlic + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,893 recipes

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

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 slow simmering.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced aroma that defines the dish.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the gravy together with the butter, giving it a smooth body.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the curry powder and flour into a smooth paste.
Cream
Adds richness and softens the sharpness of the spices.
Lemon
Adds a bright acidity that lifts the flavour of the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the cream and salt. Cream added too early can be overheated and may separate or curdle in a hot, acidic sauce. Adding it near the end, off the boil, keeps the sauce smooth and creamy.

Swap the clove

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

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

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

More chicken curry recipes

with Rice 14Indian 9East Indian 5Whole 5Coconut 4Anglo-Indian 3 See all 164 →

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipes