Curry Soup with Rice

Ingredients

• 4 onions
• 1 carrot
• 2 turnips
• 1 celery head
• 3 quarts chicken or fowl broth
• 1 tbsp curry powder
• 1 tbsp flour
• roast chicken, pieces
• 1 tsp water, boiling
• 1 tsp sugar
• 3 pints water
• 1 tbsp salt
• 225 g rice
• 2 quarts water, cold

Method

Sweat the onions, carrot, turnips, and celery in the chicken broth at a rolling boil for 20 minutes. This initial aggression softens the vegetables and extracts their flavour into the liquid — you're building a soup base, not poaching. The brisk heat matters because it drives off the volatile compounds that would otherwise make the broth taste flat and one-dimensional.

Make a liaison of curry powder and flour by whisking them together dry, then work them into a paste with a little of the hot broth. Add this back to the pot and boil for 3 minutes. The flour acts as a thickener through seasoning and gelatinisation — the heat swells the starch granules and traps the liquid. The curry powder needs this cooking time to lose its raw bite and integrate properly; uncooked curry tastes sharp and bitter.

Strain the soup through a colander to remove solids. Add the roast chicken pieces and taste. If the soup has reduced too far and turned syrupy, thin it with boiling water and a teaspoon of sugar — the sugar doesn't sweeten but rounds out the curry's spice and balances salt.

For the rice, bring 3 pints of salted water (1 tablespoon salt) to a hard boil. Wash the rice three times in cold water, then add it to the boiling water. Return to the boil — this takes roughly 2 minutes — then maintain a rolling boil for 20 minutes. The rice grains swell and the starch granules hydrate. After 20 minutes, the outside should be tender and the centre still just set. Strain through a colander and pour 2 quarts of cold water over the grains whilst still in the colander. This arrests cooking and washes away excess starch that would otherwise glue the grains together. Return the rice to the saucepan and warm it through near the heat until it's hot all through, but don't stir — let it sit so the grains stay separate.

Serve the soup in bowls with the rice offered in a separate dish. This allows each diner to proportion the ratio of broth to grain to their preference, which is the whole point of the dish.