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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. 1 calf's head 6 cloves
This is the method half of a curried chicken soup in the mulligatawny family, printed without its ingredient list — the two stray lines at the end ("1 calf's head 6 cloves") have drifted in from a neighbouring mock turtle recipe. Treat the text as a procedure to be fitted to your own quantities.
- The missing ingredient listNothing in the surviving text gives an amount for anything, so no honest conversion is possible. As a working frame only, and not as anything the book says: a jointed 3-4 lb chicken, an onion, a carrot, a stalk or two of celery, 2-3 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1-2 teaspoons curry powder, a blade of mace, a few cloves, a tomato and about 2 quarts of stock.
- Ignore the calf's headA calf's head belongs to mock turtle soup, not to a curried chicken soup. Wherever that line strayed in from, it has no place in this recipe and should not be added. (The "6 cloves" beside it may well belong to this recipe, since the method calls for cloves.)
- Brown properly, then bloom the spiceThe colour is the whole flavour base here: take the vegetables and chicken to a real brown in the butter, not just soft. Stir the flour and curry powder into the fat and cook them a minute before the stock goes in, or the soup tastes raw and dusty.
- Whole spices, not ground"Mace" means a blade or two of the outer covering of nutmeg, and the cloves are whole — both are strained out later. If you have only ground mace, add it sparingly, since it disperses into the soup instead of being lifted out.
- Chicken timingAn hour's simmer suits a mature bird on the bone. A supermarket chicken will be done in 25-30 minutes; lift the meat out then, keep it covered, and let the vegetables and stock go on simmering for the remaining time so the broth still develops.
- Straining and the sieveRubbing the vegetables through a sieve is what thickens the finished soup. A food mill or a short blitz with a stick blender does the same job, but strain the solids from the liquid first so you can control how thick it goes.
- ServingThe rice is meant to be cooked separately and plain, then spooned into the bowl so the soup is ladled over it. Boiling it in the soup clouds the broth and swells it into porridge on standing.
- YieldBuilt on 2 quarts of stock, this gives six generous bowls as a first course, or four as a main with the rice.
Curry powder, mace and cloves simmered with chicken and thickened with sieved vegetables is the standard American form of mulligatawny, a soup whose name is generally traced to Tamil words for pepper water and which reached British and then American cookbooks through the East India trade. The heading "French Chef" suggests a recipe attributed to a cook or a source rather than described by the dish, and the intrusion of the calf's head line may simply be a compositor's slip, of the kind that could occur where long soup chapters were set in dense type, with ingredient lists and methods stacked closely together.