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French Chef (Cook vegetables and chicken)
Cook vegetables and chicken in butter until brown; add flour, curry powder, mace, cloves, parsley, stock, and tomato, and simmer one hour. Strain, reserve chicken, and rub vegetables through sieve. Add chicken to strained soup, season with salt and pepper, and serve with boiled rice.
A curried chicken soup in the mulligatawny style, built as a brown vegetable base that is then sieved to thicken the broth. The method survives complete; the quantities do not, so treat the proportions below as guidance.
- The hinge: brown, then sieveMuch of the body of this soup comes from the vegetables, cooked brown in butter and then pushed through a sieve, rather than from flour alone. Take the browning slowly over medium heat until the vegetables are genuinely coloured, or the finished soup risks tasting thin and floury.
- Working proportionsFor about 2 quarts of stock, a reasonable reading is 1 chicken cut up or 2 lb of thighs, 2 onions, 1 carrot, 1 stalk celery, 2 oz butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 to 2 teaspoons curry powder, a blade of mace, 2 or 3 cloves, a few parsley stems and 1 cup of tomato.
- Curry powder of the periodCommercial curry powder of this era was generally mild and turmeric-heavy, and tins were often long-kept. A modern Madras blend is considerably stronger; start with a teaspoon, and bloom it in the butter with the flour for a minute so it loses its raw edge.
- Mace and clovesMace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg, sold as blades or ground; a blade is roughly a quarter to a half teaspoon ground, depending on its size. Both mace and cloves turn medicinal in quantity, so keep them to a whisper and remove whole cloves with the strainer.
- One hour is for the broth, not the meatBoneless chicken will be dry long before the hour is up. Either use bone-in pieces, or lift the meat out at 25 to 30 minutes, keep it covered, and let the vegetables and aromatics finish the simmer alone.
- "Tomato" means canned or fresh pulpRead this as about a cup of chopped tomato or canned tomato with its juice, not tomato paste or ketchup. It is there for acidity against the butter and curry.
- Rice served apart"Serve with boiled rice" is most easily read as rice offered separately and spooned into the plate, which keeps it from swelling in the pot and dulling the soup. Allow a scant half cup cooked rice per serving.
- YieldOn the proportions suggested above, a substantial main-course soup for six, or eight first-course servings.
Chicken simmered with browned vegetables, curry powder and rice is the Anglo-Indian mulligatawny that entered British and then American cookery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the name is generally traced to Tamil words for pepper water. By the time this recipe was printed the dish had been thoroughly naturalised: the fierce pepper broth of its origins had become a mild, buttery, flour-thickened soup of the kind a hotel or household cook could produce from stock and a tin of curry powder.