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Three Eggs (Fry the onion in the butter)
Fry the onion in the butter, add the tomatoes chillies and curry. Then pour in the stock and boil for about half an hour. Skim well. Let the soup cool. Beat the whites and yolks of the eggs together, wash and crush the shells, and add all to the soup. Stir over the fire until boiling, and strain in the usual way. Serve boiled rice separately. "Mollet" (Indian Breakfast Dish).
Ingredients.
Two ounces of Butter.
One rather large Onion sliced.
Two pounds of Fish.
One ounce and a half of Sweet Almonds.
Half a pint of Water.
One ounce of Turmeric.
One teaspoonful of Salt.
Cayenne. Two or three chopped green Chillies.
Melt the butter in a saucepan, and fry the onion a little. Blanch the almonds and pound F them, adding the water by degrees. Then put the almonds, water, salt, cayenne, turmeric and chillies into the saucepan and boil for about five minutes.
Have the fish boned if possible, and cut in pieces about one and a half inches square, place these pieces in the stewpan and cook slowly until done, from fifteen to thirty minutes according to the sort of fish. Take out the chillies, and serve with boiled rice.
Two items run together here: the tail end of a clarified curry soup (mulligatawny-style consommé) and a complete recipe for "Mollet", an Anglo-Indian fish curry thickened with almond milk. A few of the quantities and timings need adjusting before either goes near a stove.
- The page is two recipesEverything up to "Serve boiled rice separately" belongs to the preceding soup; "Mollet" begins a new dish with its own ingredient list. The stray capital F after "pound" is an artefact of the original printing or transcription, not an instruction.
- The turmeric is the thing to fixOne ounce of ground turmeric is roughly four tablespoons for two pounds of fish, which will taste medicinal and stain everything it touches. Two to three teaspoons gives the colour and earthiness the dish is after; add more only by taste.
- Almond milk stands in for coconutBlanch and pound 1½ oz sweet almonds, working in the half pint of water gradually, then use the whole unstrained mixture. A blender does this in under a minute. Unsweetened coconut milk is the closer match to the Indian original if you prefer it.
- Fish cooking timeFifteen to thirty minutes will reduce most fillets to threads. Inch-and-a-half cubes of a firm white fish (cod, haddock, monkfish, kingfish) need 6 to 10 minutes at a bare simmer, uncovered and barely stirred. Judge by opacity rather than the clock.
- Chillies whole, not choppedThe recipe says chopped but then tells you to lift them out, which only works if they go in slit lengthwise and whole. Slit them, simmer them, remove them before serving to control the heat.
- Egg-shell clarification, for the soupThe whites, yolks and crushed washed shells are a raft to clear the broth. The soup must be cold when they go in, and it must be whisked only until it comes to the boil, then left alone; stirring after the raft forms breaks it and the stock stays cloudy. Strain through a scalded cloth.
- YieldNeither dish is portioned. Two pounds of fish with rice serves four to six; the soup's quantities are not on this page, so its yield cannot be judged from what survives here.
"Mollet" is one of many English spellings — molee, moley, moilee — of an Anglo-Indian fish curry generally traced to the Malabar coast, where fish is simmered in coconut milk with turmeric, onion and green chilli rather than a roasted spice paste. It travelled home with returning families along with kedgeree and mulligatawny; that it appears here labelled as an Indian breakfast dish reflects the Anglo-Indian household habit of eating fish and rice early in the day. The substitution of pounded sweet almonds for coconut is the tell that this is a British kitchen: almonds were a standard store-cupboard thickener in grand English cookery, reaching back to medieval almond milk, while fresh coconut was a luxury import.