Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓
A Dish of Curry After the Indian Mode
Ingredients
Directions
Poach the chicken
Cut the ducks or chickens as for a fricassee and wash them clean.
Place them in a stewpan and cover with water.
Sprinkle with salt and boil until tender, covered tightly to steam well.
Remove the meat and reserve the cooking liquid.
Brown and simmer
In a pan, melt the butter and brown it slightly.
Add sliced garlic and onion, frying until brown while shaking the pan often.
Return the ducks to the pan and sprinkle with curry powder.
Cover and fry until browned, shaking the pan frequently.
Add the reserved cooking liquid and simmer together.
If desired, squeeze lemon juice into the dish before serving.
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.
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Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together29,058 recipes
Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).
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Chicken + garlictop 7% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together10,850 recipes
Shared aroma: 3-ethyl-2,5-dimethylpyrazine (roasted, nutty).
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Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together17,814 recipes
Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).
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Garlic + lemontop 9% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together8,893 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
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Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together11,368 recipes
Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Chicken or duck
- Provides the main protein; boiling until tender makes the meat soft and easy to pull apart.
- Butter
- Carries the curry flavour and browns slightly, adding richness to the sauce.
- Onion
- Browns in the fat and builds a sweet, savoury base for the sauce.
- Garlic
- Adds aroma as it fries in the butter.
- Curry powder
- Supplies the main spice flavour when fried briefly with the meat.
The step that matters
Browning the onion and garlic. Frying them until brown in butter, while shaking the pan often, develops deeper flavour through browning. Stirring prevents scorching, which would make the base taste bitter.
Swap the lemon
The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, meat, butter, clove, garlic, onion):
- Avocadofits better
- Coconutfits better
- Limefits about as well
- Lemonthe original
Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, meat, butter, clove, garlic, onion. 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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