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Mullagatawny Soup

A soup made with onion, garlic, butter, cloves, curry powder, water, pea flour, tomato soup, lemon juice, and served with boiled 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 cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Mullagatawny Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Fry the onion and garlic in butter until golden brown with the cloves.

  2. Add curry powder and fry for 1 minute.

  3. Pour in the water and bring to a boil.

  4. Mix the pea flour with a little water until smooth, then add to the boiling soup.

  5. Stir in the Tomato Soup and let it simmer gently for 30 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Before serving, add lemon juice and salt to taste.

  2. Serve with a separate dish of boiled rice.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Garlic + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Tomato + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 recipes

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

  4. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  5. Garlic + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,893 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pea flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks, giving it body.
Butter
Carries the spices and helps the onion and garlic brown for flavour.
Curry powder
Provides the main spiced aroma and flavour of the soup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the finished soup.

The step that matters

Adding the pea flour. Pea flour mixed with water to a smooth paste before it goes into the boiling soup prevents lumps. Adding it dry or unmixed causes clumps that are hard to smooth out.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, clove, garlic, butter, flour, tomato, rice):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, clove, garlic, butter, flour, tomato, rice. 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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