Skip to main content
Main

Mulligatawney Soup

A spiced beef stock soup with onions, butter, flour, curry powder, and sherry wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,092 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Mulligatawney Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Fry the sliced onions in melted butter until soft.

  2. Add flour and stir until the mixture is a rich brown color. If necessary, add more butter to achieve the desired color.

  3. Combine the mixture with beef stock and curry powder, then bring to a boil.

  4. Strain the soup and add sherry wine just 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 + beeftop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

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

  4. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Onions
Softened in butter, they build the savory base of the soup.
Flour
Browned with butter, it thickens the soup and adds toasty, nutty flavor.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced aroma that defines the soup.
Sherry wine
Added at the end, it adds a bright, fruity acidity and aroma.

The step that matters

Browning the flour. Flour cooked in fat must brown evenly to develop flavor without burning. Scorched flour turns bitter and dark, and it cannot be fixed once burnt, so cook it slowly while stirring.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, beef, sherry, wine):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, beef, sherry, wine. 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.

More mulligatawny soup recipes

Clear 6 See all 171 →

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes