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Currie Soup

A spiced soup made with onions, butter, curry powder, gravy, chicken, and tamarind.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and tamarind match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 426 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Currie Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry base

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter and add the minced onions. Cook until light brown, being careful not to burn them.

  2. Stir in the curry powder gradually until it forms a paste.

  3. Slowly add the gravy soup, mixing well, and boil gently until flavored with curry.

Cook the soup

  1. Strain the soup into another saucepan and add the chicken pieces.

  2. Stew slowly for 1 hour.

  3. In a separate bowl, combine the tamarinds with ½ pint of soup and cook to separate the stalks and stones.

  4. Strain the tamarind mixture and stir it into the soup.

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. Onion + tamarindtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together426 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Butter + tamarindtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together133 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Browned slowly in butter, they build sweetness and savory depth for the soup's base.
Curry powder
Toasted into the butter and onions as a paste, it supplies the dish's main spiced aroma and flavor.
Gravy soup
Forms the liquid body of the soup, carrying the curry flavor throughout.
Fowl
Slow stewing softens the meat and releases its juices into the soup.
Tamarinds
Their natural tartness adds acidity that brightens the rich, spiced broth.

The step that matters

Cooking the onions in butter. Onions cooked until light brown without burning develop sweetness and savory depth. Burnt onions turn bitter and can spoil the whole soup, so heat should stay moderate and they should be stirred often.

Swap the tamarind

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter. 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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