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Mulligatawny Soup

A spiced rabbit or fowl soup with onions, curry, flour, 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 5% of all ingredient pairs, and 172 recipes mention both. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mulligatawny Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions and meat

  1. Melt some butter in a pan.

  2. Gently fry the onions until amber-colored, then remove the onions and set aside.

  3. Add more butter to the same pan and lightly brown the floured rabbit or fowl pieces.

  4. Place the browned meat on the onions.

  5. Pour in 1 quart of boiling stock and stew gently for 45 minutes to 1 hour.

  6. Remove the meat.

Make the 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. Stir in the curry powder mixed with ¼ cup of browned flour and a little water or broth.

  4. Return the meat to the pot.

  5. Simmer for 20 minutes or until tender.

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

Serve

  1. Serve hot with boiled rice and 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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Rice + mangotop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together172 recipes

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

  2. Rabbit + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together252 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Onion + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together9,990 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + mangotop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together302 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together122,858 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour share little aroma chemistry, yet 122,858 recipes mention both: they likely work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 to give the soup its sweet, deep flavour and colour.
Flour
Coats the meat so it browns, and browned flour thickens and colours the soup.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced aroma that defines the soup.
Rabbit or fowl
Provides the meat, which becomes tender from stewing and adds savoury body to the stock.
Stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour of the onions and meat.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, spiced broth.

The step that matters

Stirring in the curry powder with browned flour. Curry powder is fat-soluble and its aroma fades with prolonged heat, so it is best mixed with flour and a little liquid to disperse evenly and avoid lumps, then simmered only briefly to keep the flavour bright and the soup smooth.

Flavor stand-ins for 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. Coconutabout as good a flavor fit
  2. Mangothe original
  3. Limeabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Orangeabout as good a flavor fit

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. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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