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Mullagatawny Soup

A soup of meat, onions, garlic, herbs, curry powder, lemon, and rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 29,058 recipes mention both. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Mullagatawny Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth

  1. Cut the meat into small pieces and cover with cold water.

  2. Slice the onions and fry them brown in beef drippings.

  3. Add the onions, lemon peel, herbs, and garlic or cloves to the meat.

  4. Simmer slowly for 5 hours, skimming well.

  5. Strain the mixture through a fine colander.

Finish the soup

  1. Return the liquid to the kettle and add salt and ground white pepper to taste.

  2. Stir in the rice and cook until it begins to break into pieces.

  3. Add the juice of a lemon and the curry powder.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Garlic + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together8,893 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together10,433 recipes

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

  4. Rabbit + garlictop 11% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together219 recipes

    Shared aroma: geraniol (rose, geranium).

  5. Lemon + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl, rabbit, or beef or veal
Provides the meat that gives the broth its body and savory flavor.
Onions
Fried brown first, adding sweetness and deeper color to the broth.
Rice
Thickens the soup as its starch softens and breaks down during cooking.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced aroma that defines the soup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich broth.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly and skim well. A gentle, steady simmer keeps the broth clear and lets fat and impurities rise to the surface, where they can be skimmed off. Boiling hard would emulsify fat into the liquid and cloud it.

Flavor stand-ins for the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, onion, garlic, lemon, rice):

  1. Thymebetter flavor fit
  2. Turmericbetter flavor fit
  3. Parsleybetter flavor fit
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, onion, garlic, lemon, rice. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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