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Soup

Mullagatawny Soup

A fowl and ham soup thickened with potato flour and flavored with lemon, sugar, pepper, salt, and curry powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mullagatawny Soup

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Cook the chicken

  1. Cook the fowl in the stock until tender.

  2. Remove the fowl and shred the meat.

Make the soup

  1. Add the minced ham, lemon juice, sugar, pepper, and salt to the stock.

  2. Mix the potato flour with a little water to make a paste, then stir it into the soup.

  3. Add the shredded fowl and curry powder, and simmer for 10 minutes.

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

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

  2. Pepper + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + potatotop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Provides the main meat and flavour, becoming tender as it cooks in the stock.
Minced ham
Adds savoury, salty meat flavour to the soup.
Potato flour
Thickens the soup as its starch swells when heated.
Curry powder
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the soup.

The step that matters

Stirring in the potato flour paste. Potato flour must be mixed smoothly with water before adding, otherwise it forms lumps that do not disperse. Starch thickens the soup as it heats, so the soup should be simmered gently after thickening to keep the texture smooth.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, lemon, sugar, pepper, flour. 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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