Name: Selim’s Curries
Ingredients: 1½ pounds chicken, veal, rabbit, or mutton, cut into 1½-inch pieces; 2 to 3 ounces fresh butter; 2 to 3 tablespoons curry paste; boiling water (for gravy version)

Why it works: Chicken and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,902 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Selim’s Curries

Ingredients

1½ pounds chicken, veal, rabbit, or mutton, cut into 1½-inch pieces
2 to 3 ounces fresh butter
2 to 3 tablespoons curry paste
boiling water (for gravy version)

Directions

Melt the butter in a stewpan over medium heat.
Add the meat and stir with a wooden spoon for 5 to 10 minutes.
Mix in the curry paste until well combined.
For a dry curry, serve after mixing; for a gravy curry, add boiling water and stir for an additional 10 to 12 minutes.

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.

Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,902 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Meat (in the method): Provides the main protein, which firms and browns as it cooks in the butter.
Butter: Carries the curry paste and adds richness and fat to the sauce.
Curry paste: Supplies the spice flavour that defines the dish and blooms in the hot fat.

“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.