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Mullagatawny Soup

A soup made with fowl, minced ham, white stock, lemon juice, sugar, pepper, potato flour, curry powder, served with rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mullagatawny Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Boil the fowl, ham, and stock together for 30 minutes.

  2. Remove the fowl, cut the breast into dice, and strain the stock.

  3. Return the stock to the saucepan.

Finish and serve

  1. Mix the potato flour and curry powder with a little stock, then add it to the saucepan along with the lemon juice, sugar, pepper, salt, and diced fowl.

  2. Simmer for 10 minutes and serve with rice in a separate dish.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Pepper + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + potatotop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Potato flour
Thickens the soup as it simmers, giving it a smoother body.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced, aromatic flavour that defines the soup.
Fowl
Gives the stock its rich meaty base and supplies the diced meat.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the spices and balances the richness.

The step that matters

Mixing the potato flour and curry powder with stock. Starch and spice clump if stirred in dry or added straight to hot liquid. Blending them first with a little cool stock lets the starch disperse evenly so the soup thickens smoothly without lumps.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, lemon, sugar, pepper, flour):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, lemon, sugar, pepper, flour. 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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