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Mullagatawny Soup, Calf's Head
Prepare a calf's head as for mock-turtle, put it into a stewpan with a cow-heel, cover with four quarts of water, and boil until tender. When cold cut off the meat from the bones, and brown it lightly in a little butter, with four shredded onions. Put the meat back into the stock, and add curry, flavoured to taste. This time it will bear more cayenne, Harvey's sauce, or any other sauce that may be esteemed. Rice in a separate dish should always accompany mullagatawny soup.
A late-Victorian Anglo-Indian soup built on the same foundation as mock turtle: a whole calf's head simmered down for meat and gelatin. The method is sound, but almost every ingredient here needs translating for a modern shopping list.
- Calf's headNot a supermarket item; it must be ordered from a butcher who handles whole heads, usually split and cleaned, sometimes half a head. A half head yields a few pounds of usable meat and skin, varying with the animal. Boned veal shin or shoulder plus a piece of skin-on veal breast gives a comparable result if a head is out of reach.
- Cow-heelA split beef foot, sold as cow heel or beef foot in Caribbean, Latin American and halal butchers. It contributes gelatin rather than flavour; two pig's trotters do the same job.
- "Prepare as for mock-turtle"In period practice this generally meant scalding and scraping the head, soaking it in cold water to draw out blood, and dealing with the brains and tongue separately. The recipe is a cross-reference: the detail sits in the mock turtle entry, not here.
- Boiling timeFour quarts of water over a head and heel takes roughly 3 to 4 hours at a bare simmer for the meat to leave the bone cleanly. A hard boil will cloud the stock and make the skin stringy; keep it barely trembling.
- "When cold"Not fussiness. Chilling the cooked head lets the meat firm up so it can be cut into neat dice, and lets the fat set on the stock so it can be lifted off. Overnight in the refrigerator is the practical reading.
- "Add curry, flavoured to taste"Most likely a commercial Anglo-Indian curry powder, though bottled curry pastes were also sold at the time. The recipe adds it to the stock after the browned meat goes back; frying it with the onions and butter first, to cook off the raw edge, is a modern departure. Add cautiously and taste as you go.
- Harvey's sauceA commercial anchovy-and-soy condiment, once ubiquitous and now gone. Worcestershire sauce is the closest surviving relative; a teaspoon or two at a time, tasting between.
- Yield and serviceFour quarts of stock plus the head meat makes a large quantity, enough for a good many servings. The plain boiled rice is served alongside, not in the tureen, so each diner spoons it into the soup.
Mulligatawny takes its name from the Tamil miḷagu-taṇṇīr, pepper water, a thin peppery broth of southern India that British residents in Madras adapted into something closer to a European soup by adding meat, thickening and, eventually, commercial curry powder. By the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled it had been an English dish for the better part of a century, and this version shows how far it had travelled: the base is not pepper water at all but the classic English mock-turtle preparation of calf's head and cow-heel, with curry powder and bottled sauce standing in for the original spicing. Rice is still served separately, as at the Indian table. The soup, the book notes, "will bear more cayenne" than mock turtle.