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Chicken, Curried

A chicken curry cooked with butter, curry powder, coconut, chutney, apple, lemon juice, and cream, served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Chicken, Curried

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the chicken

  1. Divide the chicken into neat joints and fry them lightly in hot butter or fat.

  2. Remove the chicken from the pan and fry the minced onion for a few minutes without browning.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the flour and curry powder, stir, and cook for a few minutes.

  2. Pour in the stock and stir until boiling.

  3. Replace the chicken in the pan, add the curry paste, coconut, chutney, sliced apple, lemon juice, and salt.

  4. Cover and cook gently for about 30 minutes, or until the chicken is tender.

  5. Add the cream or milk to the sauce and strain it over the chicken.

Serve

  1. Serve the cooked rice separately.

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

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

  2. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

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

  3. Chicken + coconuttop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together808 recipes

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

  4. Butter + coconuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Chicken
Provides the main protein, which becomes tender through gentle simmering in the sauce.
Butter or good fat
Carries the curry flavours and gives the chicken a light golden surface when fried.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce that coats the chicken.
Curry powder
Supplies the main spice aroma, which blooms when briefly cooked in fat.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and body to the sauce as it softens without browning.
Cream or milk
Adds richness and mellows the sauce's sharpness at the end.

The step that matters

Frying the onion without browning it. Browned onion turns bitter and darker, changing the flavour and colour of a pale, delicate sauce. Gentle heat softens it while keeping its sweetness.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, flour, coconut, lemon, cream, 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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