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Mulligatawny Soup
3/4 pound butter beans 1 ounce carrots, turnips, and celery 3 pints water 1 teaspoon salt 2 ounces chopped Spanish onion Parsley 3 ounces chopped apple 3 ounces sliced tomato 1 teaspoon curry powder 2 teaspoons lemon juice 1/2 ounce cornflour 1/2 pint milk Soak the beans all night in water; put them on to cook; when boiling, add the carrots, turnip, and celery. Cook until the beans are tender; then remove the carrot. Fry the onion in the butter, with the bay-leaf and parsley. Add the apples and tomato; sprinkle over the curry-powder. Stir over the fire for a few minutes, taking care that it does not burn; then add the curry-paste, chutney, flour and lemon juice. Add the butter beans, etc., and cook slowly for one juice. Add the butter beans, etc., and cook slowly for one hour. Rub through a sieve. Reheat and serve with boiled rice.
A vegetarian version of an Anglo-Indian standard, thickened with pureed butter beans rather than meat stock. The ingredient list and the method disagree in several places, so read both before starting.
- Gaps between list and methodThe method calls for butter, a bay-leaf, curry-paste and chutney, none of which appear in the ingredient list; the list gives cornflour and 1/2 pint milk, which the method never uses by name (its "flour" is the cornflour). Allow about 2 oz butter, one bay leaf, a teaspoon of curry paste and a tablespoon of mango chutney, and stir the milk in at the reheating stage after slaking the cornflour in a little of it.
- Typesetting errorThe line "cook slowly for one juice" is a compositor's slip: the sentence repeats itself, and the intended instruction is simply to simmer the whole thing gently for one hour.
- Weights and measuresOunces here are weight, not volume: 2 oz onion is a small onion, 3 oz apple roughly half a large one, 3 oz tomato a small to medium one. The "1 ounce carrots, turnips, and celery" most likely means 1 oz in total, a token flavouring rather than a vegetable component, though the wording is ambiguous and could mean 1 oz of each. 3 pints is British measure, about 60 fl oz or 1.7 litres.
- Butter beansDried butter beans, that is large lima beans. Soaked overnight they need 45-60 minutes at a bare simmer. The recipe lists salt but does not say at what point it goes in; salting early will not toughen them appreciably. Three 400 g tins, drained, stand in for the 3/4 lb dried if you skip the soak and shorten the first cooking to a warm-through.
- Bloom the curry powder, do not scorch itThe warning that it must not burn is the hinge of the dish. Curry powder in hot butter goes bitter within seconds of catching, and there is nothing later in the method to hide it. Keep the pan at a low heat and stir constantly for the two or three minutes it takes to smell toasted rather than dusty.
- SievingRubbing through a sieve is the period way to a smooth soup; a blender does it in thirty seconds, but pass it through a sieve afterwards anyway if you want the velvet texture the original is after, since bean skins do not break down. Fish out the bay leaf first; the carrot has already been lifted out earlier in the method.
- The milk at the endAdd it off the boil and reheat gently. Once the cornflour and milk are in, a hard boil will thin the starch and can curdle the soup against the lemon juice and tomato.
- YieldAbout six generous bowls. Boiled long-grain rice, a small mound in the middle of each bowl, is the traditional accompaniment and turns it into a meal.
Mulligatawny takes its name from Tamil milagu thanni, generally translated as "pepper water" — the thin, sour, peppery broth of southern India that British households in Madras adapted into a thickened, meaty soup, usually with mutton or chicken and often with rice and apple added at the English end of the journey. It appears in British cookery books as a standard "curry soup", and it is that anglicised version, not the Tamil original, which this recipe reworks. Its appearance in a meatless cookery book reflects the vegetarian publishing of the period, which often took the familiar repertoire of the middle-class table and found a substitute for the stock and the joint. Here pureed butter beans supply the body that mutton broth would have given.