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Mullagatawny Soup

A curry soup made with fowl or rabbit, onions, garlic, bacon, stock, and almonds or coconut, served with rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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

  1. Slice and fry the onions.

  2. Line a stewpan with the bacon.

  3. Cut the rabbit or fowl into small pieces and brown them slightly.

Simmer the soup

  1. Add the fried onions, garlic, and stock to the pan.

  2. Simmer until the meat is tender, skimming carefully.

  3. Once the meat is done, mix the curry powder with a little stock to form a smooth batter.

  4. Add the curry mixture and the pounded almonds or coconut to the soup.

  5. Season to taste and serve with 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 + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,893 recipes

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

  3. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Curry powder
Provides the main spice flavour and aroma of the soup.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they fry, building the soup's base flavour.
Bacon
Lines the pan and releases fat that adds savoury richness.
Fowl or rabbit
Supplies the meat that becomes tender during slow simmering.
Pounded almonds or coconut
Adds body and a creamy, nutty texture to the soup.

The step that matters

Mixing the curry powder with stock. Curry powder left dry or added directly to hot liquid can clump and taste raw. Mixing it into a smooth batter with a little cool stock first disperses it evenly, so the spice blooms and thickens the soup without lumps.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, garlic, almond, lemon, rabbit. 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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