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Mulligatawny Soup
Ingredients.
Two quarts of Stock.
One pound of Beef.
Two tablespoonfuls of Curry Paste.
One tablespoonful of Curry Powder.
The book gives the ingredients only; the method is assumed, as it often is in professional manuals of this period where the cook already knew the drill. What follows is what those quantities imply and where a modern cook has to fill gaps.
- Scale and yieldTwo quarts of stock with a pound of beef gives roughly six to eight soup plates, or more as a small first course. Halve it for a household batch; the proportions hold.
- Curry paste and curry powder are not interchangeableThe paste of the period was an oil-and-vinegar preserved compound bought ready-made from grocers and Italian warehousemen; the powder is dry ground spice. Swapping powder for the paste changes the character of the soup and risks a raw, dusty edge if it is not properly cooked out. A jarred Madras-style paste is the nearest current equivalent.
- The hinge: fry the spice, do not boil it inCurry paste and powder both want cooking in fat with the onion before the stock goes in. Stirred into simmering liquid at the end they stay gritty and taste of dust.
- The beefA pound of shin or chuck, cut small, browned, then simmered in the stock until tender, upwards of two hours. The list does not say whether the meat was strained out or left in the soup diced; both treatments appear in printed versions of the period.
- What the list leaves outMost Victorian and Edwardian versions also carry onion, a fat for frying, and a thickening of flour or rice flour, and many add a sour note, usually lemon. Without those the result is closer to curried beef broth than to mulligatawny.
- StockThe list says only "stock": read it as a plain light beef or veal broth from the book's own stock recipes. Modern boxed stock is usually already salted and often seasoned; taste before adding salt, and dilute if it is assertive.
- ServingPlain boiled long-grain rice, handed separately or a spoonful dropped into each plate. The soup should be the consistency of thin cream, not a stew.
Mulligatawny is an Anglo-Indian invention, its name generally traced to Tamil milagu tannir, "pepper water" — a thin, sour, peppery broth of southern India that British households in the subcontinent rebuilt into a substantial meat soup with stock, thickening and rice. It had been appearing in English cookery books since the turn of the nineteenth century, and by the time of this entry it was thoroughly domesticated: note that the recipe reaches for ready-made curry paste and curry powder rather than whole spices. The bareness of the entry is itself telling: in a manual of this kind a soup this familiar needed only its proportions set down, the method being assumed knowledge.