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Mulligatawny Soup
Mulligatawny is a very highly seasoned soup, hot with curry powder, and has the acid of some fruit, as lime, or lemon juice, or tart apple. It is said to be of Indian origin, the word meaning "pepper pot." 1 good-sized chicken; 1 pound veal with bones, or a quart of veal stock; 1/2 cup cold ham, cut fine; 1 carrot; 1 stalk celery; 2 onions; 1 cup tomatoes; 4 quarts water; 1 tart green apple; 1/2 glass currant jelly; 1/4 pound sweet almonds; 1 teaspoon sugar; 3 or 4 cloves; 3 or 4 pepper-corns; 2 teaspoonfuls salt; 1 tablespoonful good butter or clear beef drippings; 2 teaspoonfuls chutney; 1 or 2 drops Tabasco.
Clean, joint, and cut up the chicken. Cut the veal in small pieces and crack the bones. Put into the soup-kettle with the chopped ham, pour the cold water over it, and let it come slowly to a boil. Slice the onion and fry a light brown in the butter or drippings. Slice the carrot, apple, celery, and tomatoes. Put these in the kettle, add the cloves and peppers. Mix the curry powder, salt, and sugar to a paste, moistening with a little lemon juice or the liquor from the soup. Add this and the jelly and lemon, cut in quarters and sliced.
Pound the almonds to a paste in a mortar, moistening with milk. Strain this into the soup, and let all simmer until the chicken is tender; remove the chicken and veal and cut the meat from the bone. Return the bones to the kettle and continue to simmer until the bones are clean; then strain and skim. Put over the fire and add the meat cut in nice pieces; add the Tabasco and chutney and 2 tablespoons boiled rice. As soon as thoroughly heated, serve.
A full-day stock recipe of the old school: two meats, a long extraction, then a strain and a rebuild. Nothing here is risky, but several of the quantities and one of the techniques need translating.
- Curry powderThe method calls for curry powder mixed to a paste with salt and sugar, but no amount is given among the ingredients. For four quarts of liquid, start at 2 to 3 tablespoons of a mild curry powder and adjust after straining, since the flavour concentrates as the pot reduces.
- LemonA quartered and sliced lemon is added with the jelly, though it too is absent from the list. One lemon is right; the acid is the defining feature of the soup and should be tasted for at the end alongside the chutney.
- Half a glass of jellyA "glass" of jelly most likely means the small tumblers preserves were set and sold in, which ran to something like 6 to 8 ounces; half a glass would then be somewhere around 1/2 cup of currant jelly.
- Almond milkPounding the 1/4 lb of sweet almonds with milk in a mortar and straining gives a thin almond cream that enriches and lightly thickens the soup. A blender does the same work in a minute; strain through muslin and discard the solids.
- The four quartsFour quarts of water over a chicken and a pound of veal is a deliberately generous extraction, and the pot will reduce substantially over the long simmer before the final straining and skimming. Do not top up the pot, or the finished soup will be thin.
- TimingChicken pieces are tender in 45 minutes to an hour; pull them then, or the meat you return at the end will be stringy. The bones and veal can go back for another two to three hours.
- RiceTwo tablespoons of boiled rice for a pot this size is a garnish, not a body. Cook the rice separately and add it at service so it does not cloud the broth.
- YieldAs written the finished soup serves eight to ten as a first course.
The name comes from Tamil miḷagu taṇṇīr, pepper water, which the book renders loosely as "pepper pot" — a thin, sour, peppery broth of southern India that British households in the subcontinent reworked into a substantial meat soup. Mulligatawny had crossed back to Britain and America well before this book was written, and its appearance in a general American household compendium shows how thoroughly it had been naturalised: the curry powder, chutney and Tabasco sit here beside veal bones, currant jelly and a tart green apple without any sense of contradiction. The almond-milk enrichment is the oldest gesture in the recipe, a thickening method European kitchens had used since the medieval period.