Name: Mullagatawny Soup
Ingredients: ½ pound fresh butter; 6 large onions, sliced; 3 cloves garlic, minced; ¼ cup chopped parsley; 1 tablespoon sweet marjoram

Why it works: Parsley and marjoram match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,979 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Mullagatawny Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Melt the butter in a stew pan over low heat.
Add the sliced onions and minced garlic, and cook until light brown.
Stir in the chopped parsley and sweet marjoram.
Continue to cook for a few more minutes until fragrant.

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.

Parsley + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,979 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together29,058 recipes

Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).
Clove + marjoramtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,075 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Garlic + parsleytop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,308 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Garlic + marjoramtop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together616 recipes

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

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

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, garlic, parsley, marjoram):

Thymefits better
Sagefits better
Winter savoryfits better
Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, garlic, parsley, marjoram. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.