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Curry Chicken

A curry of chicken simmered with butter, garlic, onion, curry powder, broth, and optional citrus, served with separately boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion 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 ↓

Curry Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry

  1. In a pan, brown the butter.

  2. Add garlic and onion; fry until brown, shaking the pan often.

  3. Add the chicken and sprinkle with curry powder.

  4. Cover the pan and let the chicken brown.

  5. Add the chicken broth and optional juice; stew until tender.

Cook the rice and serve

  1. Wash the rice in salt water, then boil in 2 quarts of water for 20 minutes.

  2. Strain the rice and serve separately with the curry.

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. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Chicken + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,769 recipes

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

  3. Clove + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,987 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Garlic + chickentop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,850 recipes

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

  5. Onion + chickentop 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

Butter
Fat that carries flavor and browns, giving the curry a rich, nutty base.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma that mellows and sweetens as it cooks.
Onion
Browning caramelizes its sugars, adding sweetness and savory depth.
Curry powder
Blooms in the hot fat to release its spice aromas and color.
Chicken broth
Cooking liquid that moistens the pan and stews the chicken until tender.

The step that matters

Fry the garlic and onion until brown, shaking the pan often. Browning develops deep flavor through Maillard reactions and caramelization. Garlic burns quickly, and burnt pieces turn bitter, so constant shaking keeps the browning even.

Swap the orange

The recipe marks orange as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, clove, garlic, onion, chicken, rice):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Orangethe original

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

More chicken curry recipes

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

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