Skip to main content
Main

A Currie of Chicken

A curry of chicken with onions, apple, butter, stock, curry powder, flour, cream, salt, lemon juice, served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

A Currie of Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the chicken

  1. Fry the chicken with the sliced onions and apple in butter until browned.

Simmer the curry

  1. Place the mixture in a stewpan with garlic and stock, then simmer gently for 45 minutes.

  2. Mix curry powder and flour with 1 ounce of butter to form a paste, then combine with cream.

  3. Stir the paste into the curry and simmer for an additional 30 minutes.

  4. Add salt and lemon juice before serving 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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Apple + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Chicken + garlictop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,850 recipes

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

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  5. Chicken + oniontop 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

Chicken
Provides the main protein, which becomes tender through long gentle simmering.
Butter
Carries fat for browning the chicken and onions and building flavour.
Curry powder
Supplies the spice blend that gives the dish its characteristic aroma and flavour.
Flour
Combines with butter to form a roux that thickens the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and softens the sauce's sharpness.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they brown, adding body to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the paste into the curry. Flour and butter mixed into a paste must be fully blended into the liquid, otherwise it clumps and the sauce thickens unevenly. Keeping the sauce at a gentle simmer prevents scorching and keeps the cream from curdling.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Applethe original

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