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Fried Chicken a Ea Maeabae

A fried chicken dish flavored with curry powder and served with onions and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Fried Chicken a Ea Maeabae

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Cut up the chicken and wipe it dry.

  2. Rub the chicken with curry powder and a little salt.

  3. Fry the chicken in butter until light brown.

Make the onions

  1. Slice the onions into thin rings and cut them into bits about half an inch long.

  2. Fry the onion bits gently in clarified butter until they are dry and yellow-brown.

  3. Mix a little salt with the fried onions and strew them over the chicken.

Serve

  1. Serve with lemon on the side.

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. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

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

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

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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; frying in butter browns and crisps its skin and surface.
Curry powder
Adds spice and aroma to the chicken as it is rubbed on before frying.
Onions
Frying slowly until dry and yellow-brown adds sweetness and savoury browned flavour.
Butter
Fat for frying the chicken, promoting browning and adding richness.
Clarified butter
Fat with a high smoke point that fries the onions gently without burning them.

The step that matters

Frying the onion bits gently. Clarified butter has its milk solids removed, so it can take gentle heat for a long time. Frying slowly drives off moisture and browns the onions evenly without scorching, which would make them bitter.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Grapefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, 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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