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Soup

Curry or Mulligatawney Soup

A veal, fowl, or rabbit soup with onions, curry powder, and flour, simmered in gravy and optionally finished with citrus.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,081 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Curry or Mulligatawney Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a large pot, melt the butter and fry the meat with the sliced onions until browned.

  2. Add enough gravy to cover the meat and stir in the bruised shallots.

  3. Simmer for at least 30 minutes.

  4. In a bowl, mix the curry powder and flour, then combine with cold broth or cream until smooth.

  5. Stir the mixture into the soup and let it stew gently until the meat is tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Before serving, add a little juice of Seville orange or lemon if desired.

  2. Serve with cooked rice if you like.

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. Shallot + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Onion + shallottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,431 recipes

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Shallot + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal, fowl, or rabbit
Provides the meat that becomes tender during long gentle stewing.
Onions
Browning in butter builds sweetness and savory depth for the soup base.
Butter
Fat that carries the frying and helps brown the meat and onions.
All-purpose flour
Mixed with curry powder and liquid, it thickens the soup slightly.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced aroma that defines the soup.

The step that matters

Stirring the curry-flour mixture smooth before adding it. Flour dropped in as lumps stays lumpy, because its starch hydrates unevenly. Mixing it with cold liquid first disperses the starch so it thickens the soup evenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, butter, meat, shallot, flour, pepper, cream):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, meat, shallot, flour, pepper, cream. 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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