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Curry Soup

A creamy vegetable soup flavored with curry powder, made with onions, carrots, turnip, celeriac, butter, flour, milk, cream, egg yolks, and optional Madeira.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Curry Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the vegetables

  1. In a pot, cook the onions, carrots, and turnip in boiling water until soft.

  2. Add the celeriac root and cook until tender, then set aside the celeriac.

Make the soup base

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan, stir in the flour and curry powder, and mix well.

  2. Gradually add the milk to the mixture, stirring constantly.

  3. Strain the cooked vegetables, adding the stock to the milk mixture, and season with salt.

Finish and serve

  1. Beat the cream with the egg yolks until light, then mix a little soup into the egg mixture.

  2. Return the egg mixture to the saucepan and stir well.

  3. Pour the soup into a tureen over the sliced celeriac.

  4. If desired, add Madeira just before serving.

  5. Serve with croutons.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 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

Butter
Enriches the base and carries the curry powder flavour through the soup.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk mixture so the soup has body.
Egg yolks
Thicken the cream mixture gently and add richness when stirred into the soup.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base that the flour thickens.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk mixture. Egg yolks thicken when heated but can scramble if they meet hot liquid directly. Mixing a little hot soup into the yolks first gently raises their temperature, and stirring the mixture back into the pot slowly keeps the soup smooth.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, turnip, butter, flour, milk, cream, egg):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, turnip, butter, flour, milk, cream, egg. 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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