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Mullagatawny Soup

A hearty rabbit soup flavored with onions, curry powder, and lemon, 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: Rice and mango match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 183 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mullagatawny Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Slice onions.

  2. Fry onions gently in butter until amber-colored.

  3. Transfer onions to a deep stewpot.

  4. Add more butter to the pan, then brown the meat lightly.

  5. Place the browned meat on top of the onions.

  6. Pour in 1 quart of boiling stock.

  7. Stew gently for 45 minutes to 1 hour.

Make the curry soup

  1. Strain the stock and onions through a fine sieve.

  2. Add 2 ½ pints of stock to the strained mixture and bring to a boil.

  3. Mix curry powder with browned flour, then stir into the boiling stock.

  4. Add cold water or broth as needed.

  5. Return the meat to the pot.

  6. Simmer for 20 minutes or until tender.

  7. Add the juice of the lemon.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with boiled rice.

  2. Optionally add pickled mango strips to the soup for extra flavor.

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. Rice + mangotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together183 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Lemon + mangotop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together302 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

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

  5. Rabbit + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together252 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Cooked slowly to amber, they build the sweet, deep base of the soup.
Butter
Fat for frying the onions and browning the meat, adding richness and colour.
Rabbit
Main meat; browning gives flavour and stewing makes it tender.
Stock
Liquid that carries the flavour and forms the body of the soup.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced, aromatic character of the soup.
Browned flour
Thickens the stock so the soup has a fuller body.

The step that matters

Stirring the curry-flour mixture into the boiling stock. Flour lumps if it hits liquid unevenly. Mixing the curry powder with the browned flour first and adding it to boiling stock while stirring spreads the starch evenly, giving a smooth, thickened soup.

Swap the mango

The recipe marks mango as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, rabbit, flour, lemon, rice):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Mangothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, rabbit, flour, 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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