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Mulligatawny Soup

A spiced mutton soup with apples, carrots, onions, and turnip, thickened with flour and curry powder, served with rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 9,057 recipes mention both. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Mulligatawny Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Remove the fat from the mutton and melt it in a saucepan.

  2. Add the sliced apples and vegetables to the melted fat and cook for 15 minutes.

  3. Sprinkle in the flour and curry powder, and fry for a few minutes.

Simmer

  1. Add the mutton in small pieces, salt, herbs, and water.

  2. When the mixture boils, remove the scum, cover, and cook gently for 3 hours.

  3. Strain the soup, rub the meat through a wire sieve, and return it to the saucepan.

Finish and serve

  1. When boiling, add the lemon juice, season to taste, and serve.

  2. Serve with well-cooked 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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together8,053 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Provides meat flavour and body, and its fat carries the spices into the soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup slightly as it cooks with the melted fat.
Curry powder
Gives the soup its spiced, aromatic flavour.
Apples
Add gentle sweetness that balances the curry spices.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the finished soup.

The step that matters

Frying the flour and curry powder. Frying the flour and curry powder in fat for a few minutes cooks off raw starch taste and blooms the spices, while stopping the flour from clumping into lumps once the water is added.

Flavor stand-ins for the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, onion, carrot, turnip, parsley, thyme, flour):

  1. Limebetter flavor fit
  2. Lemonbetter flavor fit
  3. Avocadobetter flavor fit
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, onion, carrot, turnip, parsley, thyme, flour. 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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