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Mullagatawny Soup

A hearty soup made with meat, onions, garlic, herbs, curry powder, rice, and lemon, simmered for hours.

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

Prepare the stock

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

  2. Slice the onions and fry them until 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. Add the rice and cook until it begins to break into pieces.

  3. Stir in the juice of a lemon and 2 tablespoons of 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 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 + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,893 recipes

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

  3. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

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

  4. Rabbit + garlictop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together219 recipes

    Shared aroma: geraniol (rose, geranium).

  5. Lemon + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked 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 releases flavour and body into the stock during long simmering.
Onions
Browning them in drippings adds deep, sweet savoury flavour to the soup.
Rice
Breaks down as it cooks, thickening the soup and giving it body.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced aroma and warm flavour that define the soup.
Lemon
Its juice adds acidity that brightens the rich, spiced broth.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly and skim well. A long, gentle simmer draws flavour from the meat, while skimming removes foam and fat that would otherwise cloud the stock and taste greasy.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  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.

“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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