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Curry of Chicken

A chicken curry simmered in butter, onions, curry powder, and water, served with lemon.

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 ↓

Curry of Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Roll each piece of chicken in a mixture of flour and curry powder.

Brown and simmer

  1. Fry the sliced onions in butter until light brown.

  2. Add the chicken pieces and fry until they begin to brown.

  3. Transfer everything to a stewpan and pour in enough boiling water to cover the chicken.

  4. Simmer gently for 2-3 hours, adding more water if the sauce is too thick.

Serve

  1. Serve with a squeeze of lemon.

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

Chicken
Provides the main protein, and browning in fat adds savory flavor to the dish.
Onions
Soften and sweeten during frying, forming the base of the sauce.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced aroma and color that define the dish.
Flour
Coats the chicken and thickens the sauce as it simmers.
Butter
Carries the frying of onions and chicken, adding richness and browning.

The step that matters

Simmering the chicken. Simmering gently for a long time keeps the meat tender and lets the sauce thicken evenly. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and scorch the flour-based sauce on the bottom of the pot.

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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