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A dish of chicken or veal cooked with onion, butter, curry powder, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and chicken are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,814 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

To Curry Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Slice the onion and brown it in a little butter.

  2. Add the curry powder and cover for a few minutes to cook.

  3. Add more butter and the cut-up chicken or veal.

  4. Thicken the mixture with flour.

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 + chickentop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + chickentop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Onion
Browned in butter, it builds a sweet, savoury base for the sauce.
Butter
Carries the curry flavour and enriches the dish with fat, helping it brown.
Curry powder
Provides the main aroma and spice flavour of the dish.
Chicken or veal
Forms the protein of the dish, cooked in the spiced onion mixture.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smoother, more cohesive sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the curry powder. Curry powder needs a few minutes of gentle heat in fat to bloom and release its aromatic compounds. Adding it to liquid without this step leaves the spice tasting raw and dusty.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

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