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Mullagatawny Soup, Rabbit
Cut up two young rabbits into small pieces, fry them in butter until they are nearly cooked enough, with four onions sliced finely. Place these in a stewpan, pour in a quart of stock, and simmer for an hour. Then take out the rabbit, and strain off the onions; replace the rabbit in the stewpan with two more quarts of stock, as good as you wish to make it, and when it boils stir in two table-spoonfuls of curry-powder, flavoured as you may prefer; add mango pickles, etc., just before serving. Fowl may be served in the same way.
A soup built in two stages: a first simmer to draw flavour from the rabbit and onions, then a fresh, stronger stock to finish. The instructions assume you know that the curry powder should not simply be dumped into boiling liquid.
- Bloom the curry powderTwo tablespoons stirred straight into boiling stock will taste raw and dusty. Fry the powder for a minute in a spoonful of the butter left in the pan, or make a paste with a little stock, before it goes in. This is the hinge of the dish.
- QuartsCassell's is British, so a quart is 40 fl oz — three quarts is about 120 imperial fl oz, roughly 3.4 litres, or a little over 14 US cups. Using US quarts gives a slightly more concentrated soup, which is no loss.
- StewpanA wide, heavy pan with a lid — any 4-5 litre Dutch oven or stockpot serves. Wide matters more than deep here, since the rabbit pieces should sit in one layer for the initial frying.
- "Two young rabbits"Farmed rabbit runs 2.5-3 lb dressed; one is plenty for this quantity of stock. Wild rabbit is leaner, tougher and much stronger in flavour, and will want 1 1/2 hours in the first simmer rather than one.
- Don't waste the onionsThe recipe strains them off and discards them. Four onions cooked to softness are worth pressing through a sieve and returning to the second stock — it gives body the modern eater expects from mulligatawny.
- Mango pickleThe Anglo-Indian bottled pickle of the period was sharp, oily and heavily spiced. A tablespoon of chopped mango pickle from an Indian grocer added off the heat is right; mango chutney is sweeter and will change the character of the soup.
- Serving and yieldThree quarts serves eight to ten. Mulligatawny was commonly sent to table with a separate dish of plain boiled rice, and a squeeze of lemon at the end lifts the curry powder.
Mulligatawny comes into English cookery from Tamil, generally traced to milagu tannir — pepper water — a thin, sour South Indian broth that British households in India rebuilt around meat, stock and commercial curry powder. By the time Cassell's was compiled, it had been naturalised for most of a century and appears in dictionaries of cookery as a standard entry with variations by protein: mutton, veal, fowl, and here rabbit. The rabbit version says something about the Victorian larder rather than about India: rabbit was cheap, widely trapped, and often used in place of chicken, which is the equivalence the last line of the recipe makes explicit.