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A chicken dish cooked with onion, butter, curry powder, flour, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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

Oven, in the book's wordsA very hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry base

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

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

Cook the chicken

  1. Add more butter and then add the chicken pieces.

  2. Cut the chicken into small pieces.

  3. Thicken the sauce with flour.

  4. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

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. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

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
Browns in butter to build a sweet, savory base for the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat for browning the onion and cooking the chicken.
Curry powder
Provides the main spice flavor of the curry.
Chicken
Forms the main protein of the dish, cooked in the spiced sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the chicken.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with flour. Flour must be cooked in the fat and liquid to avoid a raw, pasty taste and lumps. Stirring it in evenly lets starch swell and thicken the sauce smoothly.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, chicken, pepper, 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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