Skip to main content
Main

Chicken, Curried

A fried chicken dish simmered with coconut, curry, onion, and stock, finished with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Chicken and onion 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 ↓

Chicken, Curried

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Join the chicken neatly and fry it in the butter until light brown, then remove from the pan.

  2. Slice the onion and fry it, adding the coconut, curry, sugar, and salt.

Cook and serve

  1. Put the chicken back in the pan and simmer for 30 minutes.

  2. Add the lemon juice and serve with rice.

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. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

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

  2. Chicken + coconuttop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together808 recipes

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

  3. Butter + coconuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  4. Coconut + oniontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,831 recipes

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

  5. Coconut + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Forms the main protein; browning first adds colour and savoury flavour to the dish.
Butter
Fat that carries the spices and helps the chicken brown richly.
Onion
Softens and sweetens as it fries, forming the base of the sauce.
Indian curry powder
Supplies the main spice aroma that defines the dish.
Gravy or stock
Liquid that simmers the chicken and carries the flavour into the sauce.
Coconut
Adds richness and body to the sauce while contributing a mild sweetness.

The step that matters

Browning the chicken. Frying the chicken until light brown in butter builds flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale or under-browned pieces produce a flatter sauce, and the chicken must be removed so the onion can fry without burning.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, coconut, lemon, sugar. 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 →

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipes