Soups are definitely the most preferred comfort food to keep you warm during the monsoon rain showers. Besides making your body warm and relaxed, having hot soups help ease minor congestions in the throat and nose and is an excellent remedy for cold as well.
Varieties of hot and cold soups are unavoidable in the elaborate European cuisine. But many kinds of soups that have indigenous flavour and spiciness are cooked in different Indian states too.
The good old, spicy rasam is hailed as Kerala's own soup. Rasam is incredibly popular in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu as well. Tomatoes, ginger, coriander, and black pepper are the basic ingredients to make a spicy and flavoursome rasam. However, in some places, the rasam is made sweet using mangoes, pineapple, and pomegranate.
Grated coconut is the main ingredient in Mysore rasam. Meanwhile, neem leaves are added in the special rasam that is cooked in Tamil Nadu to mark the beginning of a new year. However, the bitter taste from the neem leaves overpowers all other flavours in this rasam.
The pumpkin 'charu' cooked in Andhra Pradesh offers a riot of flavours on our palates with the perfect balancing of salt, sweet, sour and spicy. The tomato 'saar' of Maharashtra is cooked by adding boiled tomato pulp into a tempering made with cumin, mustard seeds, and tamarind. Coconut milk, too, is added to make this soup thicker.
The mulligatawny soup is a speciality of the Anglo Indian community. This dish amazingly honours the great culinary traditions of both Indian and English cuisines. Vegetables, lentils, coconut milk, and spices like cinnamon, cloves and black pepper corns are the main ingredients in this soup.
Kashmir's own 'ghost yakhni shorba' is made by cooking mutton, saffron, and yogurt in a lightly flavoured homemade masala. The 'kairiche saar' of the Konkan region treats the taste buds with its well balanced sour and sweet flavours. Raw mango and jaggery are the main ingredients in this special soup. Jaggery can be replaced with coconut milk as well.
