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Gourkha Soup
Cut a large onion into thin rings, chop two cloves of garlic very fine, and fry both a golden brown in two ounces of salted butter, along with twenty-four cloves and twenty-four peppercorns. Add a tea-spoonful of curry-powder, and two quarts of strong stock, and stir all together. Then add one pound of tomatoes sliced, three bay-leaves, and salt to taste, stirring the whole time. Let the mixture simmer gently for at least two hours, then strain through a wire sieve, allowing as much of the pulp as possible to pass through into the liquor. Serve with fried bread cut into dice. Probable cost, 2s.
A strained Anglo-Indian tomato and spice broth, closer to a consommé than a curry. The whole spices are flavouring only and all of it comes out in the sieve, so nothing here needs grinding.
- Clove restraintTwenty-four cloves in two quarts is assertive but workable because they steep whole and are strained out. If you are using a stock that is already spiced, or freshly ground clove instead of whole, cut the quantity by half — clove turns medicinal fast and cannot be pulled back.
- Two ounces of salted butterHalf a stick, about 4 tablespoons. Because the butter is salted and the stock is likely salted too, hold back on the "salt to taste" until after the two-hour simmer has concentrated everything.
- Strong stockProbably a well-reduced brown stock, though the book does not specify which. Unsalted commercial stock works; if it is thin, reduce two and a half quarts down to two before starting so the finished soup has body.
- The two-hour simmerBarely a bubble. Left uncovered it will reduce noticeably over two hours. A hard boil will emulsify the fried butter into the broth and cloud what should be a clear, glossy soup.
- SievingA conical strainer and a ladle to press with will get more tomato pulp through than a flat sieve. Do not use a blender first — puréeing the cloves, peppercorns and bay makes the soup gritty and bitter, which is exactly what the straining step exists to prevent.
- TomatoesOne pound of fresh tomatoes, sliced with skins and seeds left in since it is all strained. Out of season, a 14-oz tin of whole plum tomatoes with their juice is closer to the intended flavour than pale fresh fruit.
- Curry powderA teaspoon of a mild Victorian-style blend, typically coriander- and turmeric-led. Note that the recipe adds it along with the stock rather than frying it with the onion and garlic; frying it briefly first is a departure, on the grounds that raw curry powder in broth tastes dusty.
- Yield and serviceServes six to eight as a first course. The fried bread dice go into the plates or a separate dish at the table; added to the tureen they collapse within minutes.
- "Probable cost, 2s."Two shillings for the whole pot, a costing convention Cassell's applies throughout so a cook could budget a menu.
The spelling is Victorian English for Gurkha, the Nepali soldiers recruited into the British Indian Army from the early nineteenth century, and the name is best read as the sort of regimental label British cooks attached to spiced dishes brought home from India rather than as evidence of any Nepali original. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in London and generally placed somewhere around the turn of the twentieth century, carries a number of these Anglo-Indian entries — reflecting how thoroughly curry powder had entered the British storecupboard by then. What is striking is the technique: the spices, garlic and tomato are all strained away, leaving a clear seasoned broth in the French consommé tradition, with fried croutons in place of any rice or lentil. It is an Indian flavour palette forced into an English dinner-party service, which is a fair description of Anglo-Indian cooking generally.