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Mulligatawny Soup

A spiced soup made with ham, chicken or mutton, vegetables, apples, curry, and stock.

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 10,172 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 stock.

  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 together10,172 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

  3. Carrot + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together3,350 recipes

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

  4. Ham + chickentop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,497 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Apple + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,133 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Ham
Adds savoury, meaty flavour to the soup base.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it simmers, giving it body.
Butter
Fat for frying the ham and vegetables, carrying their flavour into the soup.
Curry powder
Provides the main spiced, aromatic character of the soup.
Apples
Add subtle sweetness and acidity that balance the curry spices.
Onions
Soften during frying and break down into the soup, adding body and sweetness.

The step that matters

Adding the flour before the stock. Flour must be cooked into the fat before liquid is added, otherwise it clumps and the soup stays floury. Stirring until it boils and then simmering gently lets the starch swell evenly and thicken the soup smoothly.

Flavor stand-ins for the apple

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

  1. Orangebetter flavor fit
  2. Limebetter flavor fit
  3. Grapeabout 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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