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Currie of Chicken or Young Rabbit

A curry stew made with chicken or young rabbit, flour, curry powder, onions, butter, and boiled in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Currie of Chicken or Young Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the skin from the chicken or rabbit and cut it into pieces.

  2. Mix the flour and curry powder in a bowl, then roll each piece of meat in the mixture.

Brown and simmer

  1. Slice the onions and fry them in butter until light brown.

  2. Add the meat to the onions and fry until the meat begins to brown.

  3. Transfer everything to a stew pan and pour in enough boiling water to cover the meat.

  4. Simmer gently for 2-3 hours, adding more water if it becomes too thick before serving.

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. Flour + buttertop 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. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

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

  5. Chicken + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Coats the meat and thickens the sauce as it cooks.
Curry powder
Provides the main spice flavour and aroma of the curry.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they fry, adding body to the sauce.
Butter
Carries the spices and onions and helps them brown.

The step that matters

Frying the meat until it begins to brown. Browning the coated meat builds deeper, roasted flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale meat added to the stew gives a flatter, less rich curry.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Grapefits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, flour, onion, 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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