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Mullagatawny Soup

A Jamaican soup made with rabbit or fowl, onions, curry powder, and stock, served with boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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

  1. Slice and gently fry the onions in butter until amber-colored.

  2. Remove the onions and place them in a deep stewpot.

  3. In the same pan, brown the rabbit or fowl pieces that have been floured.

  4. Once browned, place the meat on top of the onions.

Make the soup

  1. Pour in 1 quart of boiling stock and simmer for 45 minutes to 1 hour.

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

  3. Add 2½ pints of stock to the strained mixture and bring to a boil.

  4. Mix curry powder with flour and a little cold water or broth, then stir into the boiling soup.

  5. Add the meat back into the soup and simmer for 20 minutes or until tender.

  6. Just before serving, add the juice of the lemon.

Serve

  1. Serve hot 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. 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
Cook down to amber sweetness and body, flavouring the stock as it strains through.
Flour
Dusts the meat for browning and thickens the curry mixture stirred into the soup.
Rabbit or fowl
Provides the meat, which browns for flavour and becomes tender during simmering.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced, aromatic character that defines the soup.
Stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour and body of the soup.

The step that matters

Frying the onions to amber. Cooking onions slowly in butter until amber develops deep, sweet, caramelised flavour. Frying too fast or too hot can scorch them and leave a bitter taste that carries into the whole 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, cocoa):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Mangothe original
  4. Orangefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, rabbit, flour, lemon, rice, cocoa. 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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