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Curry of Turkey

A curry dish made with sliced turkey, onion, butter, flour, curry powder, broth, cream, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Turkey and chicken work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 688 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-decenal, which smells green, must. The science ↓

Curry of Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Fry the onion in the butter for a few minutes.

  2. Stir in the flour and curry powder.

  3. Add the chicken broth and stir until boiling.

  4. Cut the turkey into thin slices and add it to the pot.

  5. Cook slowly for 7 to 8 minutes.

  6. Add the cream and lemon juice, then serve.

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. Turkey + chickentop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together688 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-decenal (green, must).

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

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

  3. Onion + chickentop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Turkey + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

Butter and flour 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

Cold turkey
Provides the main protein; slicing it thin lets it heat through quickly in the sauce.
Butter
Fat that softens the onion and carries the curry powder's aroma into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the broth.
Curry powder
Supplies the main spice flavor and aroma of the dish.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, milder body to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the cream and lemon juice. Cream can curdle or separate if it boils hard, so it should be added at the end and kept at a gentle heat. Lemon juice adds brightness and acidity that balances the rich sauce.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, butter, flour, onion, chicken, 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.

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