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Mulligatawney Soup
Saute in 1 tablespoon melted Crisco, 1 minced onion, 1 tablespoon minced cooked ham, 3 cloves, 1/2 carrot, and 1 stick celery, minced fine, 1/2 cup cooked chicken cut in dice, and 3 pints of chicken stock. Cook fifteen minutes, add 1/2 a green apple, diced, 1/2 cup stewed or canned tomatoes, 1 teaspoon tomato catsup, 1 teaspoon curry powder, 2 tablespoons boiled rice, 1 teaspoon salt, and 2 drops Tabasco sauce. Simmer 1/2 hour and serve with or without thin slices of lemon cut in quarters.
A thin, brothy curry soup from a Crisco promotional cookbook. The instructions run everything together in one sentence; the order matters more than the wording suggests.
- Fix the sequence firstYou cannot saute chicken stock. Soften the onion, ham, carrot and celery in the fat with the cloves, then add the diced chicken and the stock and cook fifteen minutes. Everything after that goes in for the half-hour simmer.
- CriscoIntroduced as an all-vegetable shortening and named throughout this book because the book was published to sell it. Butter or a neutral oil does the same job in a tablespoon of sauteing fat.
- 3 pintsSix cups. The finished soup is deliberately thin — this is a broth with garnish, not a thickened mulligatawny.
- Whole clovesCloves -- The wording leaves it unclear whether the three cloves are meant to be minced with the vegetables or dropped in whole. If whole, fish them out before serving, or tie them in a scrap of cheesecloth so they can be lifted cleanly.
- Bloom the curry powderA teaspoon of curry powder stirred into liquid tastes dusty. Add it to the fat with the aromatics, or to the pot a minute before the tomatoes go in, so it cooks briefly in fat rather than steeping raw in stock. Commercial curry powders of this period were generally milder than modern blends, so the same volume of a modern one may read stronger.
- The appleHalf a tart green apple is doing real work here — it is the sweet-sour counterweight to the curry. Add it with the tomatoes rather than earlier so it holds some shape over the half hour.
- RiceTwo tablespoons of already-boiled rice, added with the tomatoes and simmered the full half hour. It will keep swelling and softening in a leftover pot, so cook and add it fresh if you plan to reheat.
- YieldAbout six cups, serving four to six as a first course. The quartered lemon slices are worth including; the acid sharpens an otherwise flat broth.
Mulligatawny comes from the Tamil milagu tannir, generally translated as "pepper water" — a thin, peppery South Indian broth that British households in colonial India reworked into a meat-and-curry soup, and which came back to Britain and then America as one of the first widely familiar "curried" dishes. By the time it reached a book like this one it had been thoroughly domesticated: chicken stock, a little ham, canned tomatoes, bottled catsup and two drops of Tabasco, with a single teaspoon of commercial curry powder standing in for a whole spice cabinet. That combination of tinned and bottled shortcuts is characteristic of American cookbooks of the period, and this one especially — it was issued by a shortening manufacturer, which is why a tablespoon of Crisco opens a recipe that has nothing otherwise to do with baking fat.