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Curried Fowl

A stew of fowl cooked with curry powder, onions, tomatoes, garlic, raisins, and milk, finished with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic 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 ↓

Curried Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry stock

  1. Mix curry powder with a little milk to form a smooth paste, then gradually add the rest of the milk and stir in the stock until smooth.

  2. Place the mixture in a clean stewpan and simmer gently for 4 hours until reduced by half.

Cook the fowl

  1. Fry sliced onions, tomatoes, and garlic in butter until soft, then brown the fowl pieces.

  2. Combine all ingredients except lemon juice in a stewpan with the reduced stock and stew slowly for 30 minutes.

  3. Add lemon juice before serving.

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 + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  5. Garlic + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,893 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through slow stewing in the sauce.
Curry powder
Supplies the main spice flavour and aroma of the sauce.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they fry, adding body to the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the onions and fowl brown.
Milk
Adds creaminess and mellows the sauce's texture.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and body, helping thicken the sauce as they break down.

The step that matters

Simmer the stock gently for 4 hours. A gentle simmer reduces the liquid evenly and concentrates the flavour. Too much heat can scorch the milk and curry paste on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, tomato, milk, clove, garlic, lemon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, tomato, milk, clove, garlic, lemon. 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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