Name: Consomme Calcutta
Ingredients: 6 quarts clear consomme; 1 teaspoon tomato curry pulp; cayenne pepper (or Tabasco or chili sauce)

Why it works: Tomato and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,923 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Consomme Calcutta

Ingredients

6 quarts clear consomme
1 teaspoon tomato curry pulp
cayenne pepper (or Tabasco or chili sauce)

Directions

Prepare

Prepare the clear consommé according to the directions for royal consommé.
Use roasted brown fowl or brown glaze made by boiling down meat for flavor.

Serve

Add 1 teaspoon of tomato curry pulp to each serving plate.
Sprinkle with cayenne pepper, Tabasco, or chili sauce to taste.

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.

Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tomato curry pulp: Adds concentrated tomato and spice flavour and a little colour to the broth.
Cayenne pepper: Adds sharp heat that lifts the flavour of the broth.

“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.