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Pimento Curry

A chicken curry flavored with curry powder, cayenne, and lemon, simmered in stock and served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Pimento Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Rub curry powder, salt, and cayenne into each piece of fowl.

  2. Place the fowl in a saucepan and almost cover with stock.

  3. Simmer gently for about 20 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Squeeze in the juice of the lemon and serve with a border of rice.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Pepper + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Lemon + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Provides the main protein, which becomes tender as it simmers gently in the stock.
Curry powder
Supplies the dominant aroma and warm spice flavour of the curry.
Stock
Cooks the fowl in liquid and forms the base of the sauce, adding savoury depth.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, spiced sauce just before serving.

The step that matters

Simmering gently. Keeping the stock at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil keeps the fowl meat tender and stops the proteins tightening and toughening. Vigorous boiling also makes the liquid reduce unevenly and can cloud the sauce.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, rice):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, rice. 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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