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Mullagatawny Soup

A rabbit or meat soup with onions, curry, flour, stock, lemon, served over 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 onions

  1. Slice the onions.

  2. Gently fry the onions in butter until amber-colored. Remove the onions and place them in a deep stewpot.

Brown the meat and stew

  1. Add more butter to the pan and lightly brown the meat.

  2. Place the browned meat on top of the onions and pour in 1 quart of boiling stock.

  3. Stew gently for 45 minutes to 1 hour. Remove the meat.

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

Make the soup

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

  2. Mix curry powder with browned flour and a little cold water or broth. Stir the mixture into the boiling stock.

  3. Return the meat to the pot and simmer for 20 minutes or until tender.

  4. Add the juice of the lemon just before serving.

  5. Serve hot with boiled rice. Optionally add pickled mango strips.

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
Break down during long frying and stewing to build the body and deep color of the soup.
Curry powder
Provides the main spiced flavor that defines the soup.
Browned flour
Toasted flour thickens the stock and adds a nutty, roasted depth.
Rabbit or fowl
Floured and browned meat gives savory richness and body to the broth as it stews.
Butter
Fat for frying the onions and browning the meat, adding richness and browned flavor.

The step that matters

Browning the onions to amber. Frying slowly until amber develops sweet, caramelized flavors that shape the soup's depth. Pale or burnt onions would give a flat or bitter base.

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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