Skip to main content
Main

Mulligatawny Soup

A hearty Indian soup made with veal, ham, vegetables, apples, and curry powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Mulligatawny Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Break the veal bone and place the veal, ham, and water in a soup kettle.

  2. Fry the onions in a little butter until brown, then add them to the kettle.

  3. Add the sliced apples, chopped vegetables, cloves, peppercorns, sugar, and curry powder mixed with a little water.

  4. Simmer gently for 5 hours.

Strain and finish

  1. Strain the soup.

  2. Cool the soup.

  3. Remove any fat that forms.

  4. Return the soup to heat.

  5. Add a piece of veal for each serving.

  6. Season with salt and pepper.

  7. Serve hot.

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. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Gives the soup its meaty body and rich flavor as it simmers slowly.
Apples
Add natural sweetness and fruity acidity that balance the curry spices.
Curry powder
Provides the warm, aromatic spice character that defines the soup.
Onions
Browning in butter adds deeper, sweeter savory flavor to the broth.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 5 hours. A gentle simmer extracts flavor from the veal bone and ham slowly and clearly. A hard boil would make the broth cloudy and greasy and can toughen the meat.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, ham, carrot, onion, turnip, clove, sugar):

  1. Lemonfits about as well
  2. Applethe original
  3. Orangefits about as well
  4. Limefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, ham, carrot, onion, turnip, clove, sugar. 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

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesVeal PattiesVeal Patties50 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipesApple SoupApple Soup33 recipes