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Mulligatawny Soup
5 cups White Stock II 1 cup tomatoes Onion, cut in slices (1/4 cup each) Carrot, cut in cubes (1/4 cup each) Celery, cut in cubes (1/4 cup each) 1 pepper, finely chopped 1 apple, sliced 1 cup raw chicken, cut in dice 1/4 cup butter 1/3 cup flour 1 teaspoon curry powder Blade of mace 2 cloves Sprig of parsley Salt and pepper
An ingredient list in the spare style of a cooking-school manual, where the method for a whole class of thickened soups was taught once and then assumed. A few of the entries need translating before you can work from it.
- White Stock IIA cross-reference to another page in the same book. Stocks of this name are generally mild ones built on veal or fowl bones with unbrowned aromatic vegetables; a good low-sodium chicken stock stands in for it directly.
- The parenthetical quantitiesThe onion, carrot and celery are each meant to be measured as a quarter cup after cutting, not a quarter cup of the three together. That is roughly a small onion, one small carrot and one rib of celery.
- "1 pepper"Most likely a green bell pepper, seeded; the recipe does not specify.
- Blade of maceA single piece of the dried outer covering of nutmeg, sold whole as blades. About a quarter teaspoon of ground mace is equivalent, though it will cloud the soup rather than lift out cleanly.
- Curry powderOne teaspoon is a very restrained hand by modern standards. Bloom it in the butter with the flour so it loses its raw dustiness.
- The diced chickenIt goes in raw and must actually cook through in the simmering soup: give the diced meat a good ten minutes at a bare simmer and check that it reaches 165F. Keep the dice small so the pieces cook evenly.
- Whole spicesMace blade, cloves and parsley sprig are seasonings to be removed, not eaten. Tie them in a scrap of cheesecloth or fish them out before serving.
- YieldRoughly six cups of finished soup once the vegetables have given up some volume and a little liquid has gone in the cooking, or about four servings as a first course. Mulligatawny is often served with plain boiled rice spooned in at the table.
Mulligatawny came into English cookery from southern India, the name generally traced to Tamil words for pepper and water; it began as a thin peppery broth and was rebuilt by British households in India into a substantial curried soup with meat, apple and rice. By the late nineteenth century it was thoroughly domesticated in American and British cookbooks, and its presence in a domestic-science manual like this one shows how far it had travelled from anything resembling its origin: a roux of butter and flour, a single cautious teaspoon of curry powder, and a sliced apple standing in for the sweet-sour fruit or tamarind of the older versions. The apple is the tell of the Anglo-Indian line rather than the Indian one.