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East India Curry

A chicken curry simmered in clarified butter, curry powder, and stock, served over Patna rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and chicken match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,148 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

East India Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry

  1. Heat clarified butter in a stewpan and fry sliced onions until brown.

  2. Add curry powder and mix well.

  3. Pour in consommé or beef stock and stir to combine.

  4. Add chicken pieces and stew until fully cooked.

  5. Season with salt to taste.

Prepare the rice and serve

  1. Wash and boil Patna rice until done, then dry it in a stewpan by the fire.

  2. Serve the curry over the rice.

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. Beef + chickentop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,148 recipes

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

  2. Chicken + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,769 recipes

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

  3. Onion + beeftop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

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

  5. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Fried until brown, they build a sweet, savoury base for the sauce.
Clarified butter
Its fat carries the curry powder's aroma and helps the onions brown.
Curry powder
Blooms in the hot fat to release its spice aroma into the sauce.
Consommé or light-colored beef stock
Forms the liquid base that cooks the chicken and carries the flavour.
Chicken
Provides the main protein, which becomes tender as it stews in the sauce.

The step that matters

Frying the onions until brown. Onions that are only softened will leave the sauce pale and sweet-flat. Browning them through slow, steady frying develops deeper flavour through the Maillard reaction, which gives the curry its savoury foundation.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits about as well
  2. Onionthe original
  3. Tomatofits about as well
  4. Asparagusfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, beef, chicken, rice. 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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