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To Curry Chicken

A curry dish made with chicken, veal, onions, butter, curry powder, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and chicken 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 ↓

To Curry Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a pan, brown the sliced onion in butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the curry powder and cover the pan for a few minutes to cook.

  3. Add a little more butter and the chicken and veal pieces.

  4. Cut the meat into small pieces and thicken the mixture with flour.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Chicken + vealtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-butanedione (buttery, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + chickentop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

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

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

Onion
Browns in butter to build sweetness and a savory base for the sauce.
Curry powder
Provides the main spice flavour and aroma of the dish.
Chicken
Supplies the main meat and its flavour to the curry.
Veal
Adds meat and body alongside the chicken.
Flour
Thickens the mixture into a sauce.

The step that matters

Cook the flour into the mixture gradually. Flour added to hot liquid or fat can clump if not stirred in well, leaving lumps. Cooking it briefly in the mixture lets starch swell evenly and thicken the sauce smoothly.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

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