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Receipt for Making the Curry

A chicken curry simmered with onions, curry powder, and a creamy sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Receipt for Making the Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the chicken and onions

  1. Fry the chicken pieces in a pan until nicely browned.

  2. In the same pan, fry the sliced onions until golden.

  3. Add the fried chicken and onions to a stew pan with curry powder.

Simmer the stew

  1. Cover the stew pan with water or veal gravy.

  2. Add the garlic to the stew.

  3. Let the stew cook on low heat for one hour or until very tender.

Finish with cream

  1. In a bowl, mix cream, flour, butter, lemon juice, and salt.

  2. Add the cream mixture to the stew.

  3. Bring the stew to a boil.

  4. Remove the stew from heat.

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. Cream + buttertop 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 browns for flavour and becomes tender during slow cooking.
Onions
Soften and turn golden, adding sweetness and body to the sauce.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced aroma that defines the dish, bloomed in the cooking fat.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy texture to the finished sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce slightly when combined with the butter and cream.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a silky mouthfeel in the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the cream mixture to the stew. Cream and lemon juice can curdle when they meet hot liquid. Bringing the stew to a boil after adding dairy with acid risks separation, so the sauce should be heated gently and kept from a hard boil.

Swap the clove

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

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

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