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Mulligatawny Soup

A soup made with ham, chicken or mutton, vegetables, apples, curry, and spices, simmered and sieved.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 10,173 recipes mention both. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Mulligatawny Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the vegetables and cut them into pieces.

  2. Chop the apples and cut the ham into small dice.

Make the soup

  1. Fry the ham, vegetables, and apples in the butter.

  2. Add the flour, curry powder, curry paste, and all other ingredients.

  3. Stir until it boils, then simmer until the vegetables are tender.

  4. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled 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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together3,467 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together3,351 recipes

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

  4. Apple + celerytop 11% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together1,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  5. Carrot + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together680 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Lean ham
Adds savoury meat flavour to the base of the soup.
Onions
Soften during frying and build body and sweetness in the soup.
Butter
Fat for frying that carries curry flavour and adds richness.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks, giving it body.
Curry powder
Provides the main spiced aroma and flavour of the soup.
Apples
Add mild sweetness and acidity that balance the curry spices.

The step that matters

Simmer until the vegetables are tender. Simmering gently until the vegetables are fully soft lets their starches and flavours release, so the sieved soup turns smooth. Stopping early leaves pieces that will not pass through the sieve cleanly.

Flavor stand-ins for the apple

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

  1. Limebetter flavor fit
  2. Orangebetter flavor fit
  3. Cherryabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, carrot, flour, sugar, chicken, celery, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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