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Fowl Curry, Kofta

A curry of chicken kofta made from ground chicken, suet, breadcrumbs, and spices simmered in a buttery sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Fowl Curry, Kofta

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the kofta

  1. Remove the fleshy parts from the chicken and reduce them to a pulp with the liver, heart, and cooked gizzard using a mortar and pestle, then add 4 ounces of fresh suet to the chicken pulp.

  2. Make a strong stock from the chicken bones and skin.

  3. Mix the pulp with salt, black pepper, herbs, bread crumbs, a little stock, and enough beaten egg to form a paste.

  4. Roll the mixture into balls the size of a large walnut.

Fry the kofta

  1. Melt 2 ounces of butter in a stewpan.

  2. Add onion paste, garlic paste, curry powder, and vinegar to the butter; stir well.

  3. Add the balls, rolled in bread crumbs, to the stewpan.

  4. Season with salt.

  5. Turn them to brown evenly.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Chicken + garlictop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,850 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-ethyl-2,5-dimethylpyrazine (roasted, nutty).

  4. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

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

  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 meat that gives the kofta its body and savoury flavour.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the balls moist and tender as they cook.
Bread crumbs
Soak up moisture and help bind the mixture into a shapeable paste.
Butter
Carries the spices and helps the balls brown in the pan.
Curry powder
Adds the spiced aroma that defines the curry.
Onion paste
Adds savoury sweetness and body to the curry base as it cooks.

The step that matters

Mix the pulp with enough beaten egg to form a paste. The egg and bread crumbs bind the mixture. Too little egg leaves the balls crumbly and likely to break apart, while too much makes them wet and soft, so they may not hold their shape in the pan.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, bread, garlic, butter, pepper, vinegar):

  1. Onionthe original
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Tomatofits about as well
  4. Potatofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, bread, garlic, butter, pepper, vinegar. 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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