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Soup

Curry Soup

A savory soup of apple, onion, and bacon flavored with curry powder and paste, thickened with rice flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Curry Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Cut the bacon into pieces and melt it in a saucepan.

  2. Add the herbs, sliced onion, and chopped apple.

  3. Stir in the curry powder and paste, then add a little tomato liquor.

  4. Gradually add the stock, cover, and cook for at least 30 minutes.

Strain, thicken and serve

  1. Pass the mixture through a sieve back into the pan.

  2. Season with more salt if needed, add lemon juice, and mix in ½ ounce of rice flour with cold stock.

  3. Bring to a boil, skim, and serve with boiled rice sprinkled with saffron.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Curry powder
Provides the main spiced flavour and aroma of the soup.
Apple
Adds natural sweetness and body as it softens into the soup.
Onion
Softens during cooking to add savoury depth and body to the base.
Bacon
Melted fat carries flavour from the pan into the soup and adds savoury taste.
Rice flour
Starch thickens the liquid so the soup becomes smoother and more substantial.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the richness of the soup.

The step that matters

Mixing the rice flour with cold stock. Starch clumps if it hits hot liquid directly. Mixing it into cold stock first disperses the granules evenly, so they thicken the soup smoothly without lumps.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, lemon, parsley, thyme, pepper, ham, rice):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, lemon, parsley, thyme, pepper, ham, 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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