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Mullagatawny Soup, Household
Soak two pounds of tinned mutton in two quarts of water. Fry two apples, two onions, two turnips, two leeks, and a bunch of herbs. Pour on them a pint of the liquor in which the meat is soaking; boil for half an hour. Mix two table-spoonfuls of flour and one of curry-powder with cold water. Stir into the liquid, add the rest of the water and the meat. Boil for three hours. Press the whole through a sieve, boil again, add salt, also a dash of lemon, and serve with boiled rice. Time to simmer meat, four hours.
A late-Victorian economy version of mulligatawny built around tinned meat, which was cheap and plentiful by the 1890s. The method needs rethinking more than the flavours do.
- Tinned muttonCanned mutton was fully cooked, salted meat sold in large tins, chiefly imported from Australia and New Zealand. It is not sold in most markets now; 2 lb of boneless lamb shoulder or mutton, cut small, is the sensible stand-in, and it will need browning first rather than soaking.
- The soaking stepThe recipe soaks the meat and then uses that same water as the stock, so the soak looks like a way to soften the tinned meat and draw its flavour into the liquid rather than to remove brine, which would only go back into the pot. With fresh lamb, skip it entirely and use 2 quarts of water or light stock, simmering the meat to build the broth.
- Fry in whatThe original assumes you know to use dripping, butter or ghee. Allow about 2 oz of fat and cook the apples, onions, turnips and leeks until genuinely golden, not merely softened, since that browning carries most of the sweetness in the finished soup.
- Bloom the curry powderHere the curry powder is stirred in as a cold slurry with flour, which leaves it raw and dusty. Better to add the curry powder to the vegetables in the hot fat for a minute before the flour goes in. The recipe's single tablespoon is a reasonable starting point; add it and taste.
- TimingsThree hours of hard boiling after the meat goes in is a legacy of tough mutton and unreliable ranges, and the closing 'time to simmer meat, four hours' reads as the total for the dish rather than a further four hours. Fresh lamb shoulder is tender in about 90 minutes at a bare simmer; anything longer only shreds it and dulls the spice.
- Passing through the sieveThe whole soup, meat included, is meant to go through a sieve for a smooth puree. A blender does this in seconds, though some cooks prefer to puree the vegetables only and return the meat in small pieces.
- Salt and lemonSalt last, after the purée. If you have used any tinned or brined meat the soup will already be well seasoned. The "dash of lemon" is not a garnish but the acid that lifts the whole thing; a good tablespoon of juice, added off the heat.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of meat and two quarts of liquid makes six to eight servings. Boiled long-grain rice goes in the bowl first, with the soup ladled over.
Mulligatawny is the best-known survivor of Anglo-Indian cookery, its name generally traced to the Tamil milagu tannir, "pepper water" — a thin, peppery South Indian broth that British households in Madras enriched with meat, thickened with flour and turned into a soup course of the European kind. By the time Cassell's was compiled it had been an English standard for the better part of a century, and this "household" version shows what happened to it at the thrifty end of the market: the mutton comes out of a tin, the spicing is a spoonful of shop-bought curry powder, and the aromatics are the ordinary root vegetables of a British kitchen garden. Cheap canned meat from Australia and New Zealand had become a fixture of the late-Victorian larder, and recipes like this one exist largely to make it palatable.