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Mulligatawny Soup

A spiced chicken soup with carrots, onions, apples, curry powder, lime, and streaky pork, served over boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 21,601 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Mulligatawny Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Place the fowl pieces in a pot with 2 quarts of cold water and bring to a boil.

  2. Skim the surface and simmer for 1.5 hours.

Build the soup

  1. In a separate pan, heat a little clean fat and add the sliced carrot, onion, and apple rings; brown them nicely.

  2. Stir in curry powder to taste and add 1 teaspoon of lime juice.

  3. Remove the fowl from the stock and add the browned ingredients; simmer for 30 minutes.

  4. Thicken the soup with brown flour and strain it.

  5. Return the fowl to the soup, add diced streaky pork, and bring to a boil.

Serve

  1. Serve with plain boiled rice.

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

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

  2. Carrot + limetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together646 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,477 recipes

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

  4. Lime + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,014 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Provides the meat and flavour base of the stock as it simmers.
Brown flour
Thickens the soup so it has body rather than running thin.
Streaky pork
Adds richness and fat to the finished soup.
Lime juice
Adds acidity that brightens the curry flavour.

The step that matters

Browning the carrot, onion and apple. Browning caramelises the natural sugars and builds deeper, savoury flavour in the base. Pale vegetables produce a flatter soup, so they should be coloured well before the stock is added.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, onion, lime, flour, pork, rice):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, onion, lime, flour, pork, rice. 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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