Home › The Principles of Cookery › Mullagatawny Soup, Vegetable
Mullagatawny Soup, Vegetable
Take five or six young vegetable-marrows, and the same of middle-sized cucumbers, pare, cut them lengthwise into slips, empty their seeds, and divide them again into dice. Pare and core four sour apples or tomatoes, and slice a couple of Spanish onions. These last fry, slightly browning them, in a large stewpan, with a quarter of a pound of good fresh butter. Throw in the other vegetables before the butter has acquired much colour, and stir them gently round. Shake the pan frequently, and stew gently over a slow fire until half done, when add from two to three large table-spoonfuls of good curry powder, and stew the vegetables until they will pulp, pouring in boiling veal stock enough to cover. Strain through a coarse hair-sieve, pressing the pulp with a wooden spoon. Add more stock, or even water, if stock be not at hand, according to the quantity of soup required, and any additional seasoning--salt, cayenne, or lemon-juice. Thicken if necessary with a very little ground rice or arrowroot, and serve with rice, if liked; but it should be, if properly made, quite thick enough without any addition. Time, two hours to prepare. Sufficient, one quart for six persons.
A meatless mulligatawny built on squash and cucumber rather than mutton, thickened by nothing but its own pulp. The whole method hinges on stewing the vegetables slowly in butter until they collapse, so resist the urge to add liquid early.
- Vegetable marrowA marrow is a summer squash left to grow large — the nearest supermarket equivalent is an overgrown zucchini. Five or six of them is a great deal of squash; note that the recipe calls for the same number of cucumbers, not the same weight.
- CucumberPeel and seed as directed. Older field cucumbers have bitter skins and watery, tough seed cores, and both will show in a soup that is essentially pure vegetable pulp.
- Butter and heatA quarter pound is one stick, 4 oz. "A slow fire" means low heat — you want the vegetables to sweat down and break, not to catch or fry.
- Curry powderVictorian curry powders were commonly built on coriander and turmeric, though blends varied widely and some were sharply peppery. Start with one tablespoon, let it fry a minute in the buttery vegetables to lose its raw edge, then taste up.
- StockVeal stock was the standard neutral base of the period; a light chicken stock does the same job, and for a genuinely meatless version use a mild vegetable stock rather than a dark, tomato-heavy one, which will fight the curry.
- The sieve"A coarse hair-sieve" pressed with a wooden spoon gives a thick, slightly textured purée. A food mill on the medium plate is the closest match. A blender works but produces something smoother and frothier than intended — pulse rather than liquefy.
- ThickeningGround rice or arrowroot is a fallback only. If the soup seems thin, reduce it instead; the recipe is correct that a properly stewed batch needs nothing.
- Yield"One quart for six persons" is a small cup each, which tells you how thick and how highly seasoned this was meant to be. As a modern first course, plan on a quart serving three to four.
Mulligatawny came into English cooking from southern India, its name generally traced to the Tamil mi inop— the Tamil for "pepper water" — a thin, sharp, peppery broth that British households in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries steadily rebuilt into a thick curried soup with mutton, rice and apple. By the time this book was compiled it was a fixture of the English repertoire rather than an exotic novelty, which is why a dictionary of cookery can offer variants: a meat version, and this one, where marrow and cucumber pulp carry the body that stock and flour would otherwise supply. The sour apple is often described as an Anglo-Indian stand-in for the acidity of tamarind or unripe mango; the alternative of tomatoes, offered here as a straight equal option rather than an afterthought, suggests the fruit was by then familiar enough in Britain to pass without comment.