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MULLAGATAWNY SOUP (another way)
For this favourite Indian soup take a couple of chickens, a large fowl, a knuckle of veal, or a calf's head, with the trimmings, bones, and gristles of the breast of veal. Make a good strong stock; this must be carefully attended to. Cut the meat into pieces--mouthfuls--or the fowl into small joints, and simmer gently in about half a gallon of water. Fry six middle-sized onions and a couple of cloves of garlic shredded finely, in two ounces of butter. Pound and mix well together an ounce of coriander-seed, a quarter of an ounce each of chives, turmeric, and cassia, a salt-spoonful of cayenne, and rather more of black pepper. Put these ingredients with two large spoonfuls of riceflour into a basin, mix them with some of the broth the meat has been boiled in, and strain into the rest. Simmer until the soup is about the thickness of cream. Before taking it off the fire add the juice of a lemon to flavour it. Some people use sour apples or other acids in mullagatawny, but the lemon-juice is preferable. Serve the meat in the soup, with boiled rice separately, and cut lemons on a plate. Time, simmer from two to three hours. Probable cost, 2s. per quart. Sufficient for eight persons.
A Victorian mulligatawny built on a genuine meat stock rather than a curry powder shortcut. The spice paste is the whole point, and the order of operations — stock first, spices bloomed into it, acid last — is what keeps it from tasting muddy.
- The hinge: lemon juice goes in off the heatThe hinge: lemon juice goes in last -- The recipe adds the juice "before taking it off the fire" -- that is, at the very end, with the pot still on the heat but only for a moment. Prolonged boiling of citrus in a spiced, rice-flour-thickened soup dulls the sharpness that balances the cassia and coriander.
- Quantities and vesselsHalf a gallon in a British text is 4 imperial pints, about 2.3 litres (roughly 9-10 US cups). A salt-spoonful is conventionally reckoned at about a quarter teaspoon, so cayenne is about 1/4 tsp and black pepper a little more -- modest heat by present-day expectations. "Two large spoonfuls" of rice flour is probably around 2 tablespoons.
- Choosing the meatTwo chickens or a large fowl means an older, tougher bird that wants the full two to three hours; a supermarket chicken of 3-4 lb will be shredding after 60-75 minutes. A veal knuckle or calf's head is a gelatine source — a veal or beef shin, or added chicken feet, does the same job for a stock with body.
- "Chives" is almost certainly a misprint"Chives" may be a misprint -- A quarter ounce of chives pounded with coriander, turmeric and cassia sits oddly in this company, and comparable Anglo-Indian spice mixes of the period tend to call for cumin, fenugreek or dried chillies at this point. The original is ambiguous and worth treating as such rather than followed literally.
- Cassia, not cinnamonCassia bark is the coarser, more pungent cousin of true Ceylon cinnamon, and much of what is sold simply as "cinnamon" is in fact cassia. A quarter ounce is roughly two 3-inch pieces, ground.
- Whole spices, freshly groundAn ounce of coriander seed is roughly 4 to 5 tablespoons whole. Toasting the seed briefly in a dry pan before pounding costs a minute and is the difference between a fragrant soup and a dusty one.
- Blooming and strainingSlaking the pounded spices and rice flour with a ladle of hot broth before straining them into the pot prevents both lumps and raw-flour taste. "About the thickness of cream" is a light coating consistency, not a gravy.
- Yield and serviceEight servings, and the accompaniments matter: plain boiled rice served separately, cut lemon on the side, the meat left in the bowl.
Mulligatawny came into English cookery from Tamil — miḷagu taṇṇīr, roughly "pepper water" — describing the thin, peppery, tamarind-soured broths of southern India that East India Company households encountered in the eighteenth century. What the British made of it was something else: a substantial meat soup, thickened with rice flour and enriched with fowl or veal, in which the original pepper-and-acid logic survives only in the cayenne and the lemon juice. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the late nineteenth century the dish was thoroughly domesticated as a "favourite Indian soup" of the English dinner table, and its presence in a general dictionary of cookery — with a costing in shillings per quart and a spice mixture pounded from scratch rather than bought as curry powder — shows a kitchen that still expected to grind its own masala, even if it no longer had much idea what the name meant.