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Mulligatawny Soup
5 cups White Stock II 1 cup tomatoes Onion, cut in slices Carrot, cut in cubes 1/4 cup each Celery, cut in cubes } 1 pepper, finely chopped 1 apple, sliced 1 cup raw chicken, cut in dice ¼ cup butter 1/3 cup flour 1 teaspoon curry powder Blade of mace 2 cloves Sprig of parsley Salt and pepper
A late-Victorian American reading of an Anglo-Indian soup, built on the standard white stock of the book's stock chapter. The ingredient list is the whole of what survives on the page, so the sequence has to be inferred from the way the book handles other thickened soups.
- White Stock IIA mild veal-and-chicken stock, only lightly seasoned. Any good low-sodium chicken stock stands in; avoid anything heavily reduced or browned, since the roux and curry powder need a neutral base.
- Working orderCook the sliced onion, carrot, celery, pepper and apple gently in the butter until soft but not coloured, stir in the flour and curry powder and cook a minute or two, then add the stock and tomatoes with the mace, cloves and parsley. Simmer about half an hour and strain before finishing.
- Curry powderA teaspoon in five cups is very mild by current standards, and tinned blends of the period may well have been milder and less fresh than what is sold now. Taste after the soup has simmered and adjust rather than doubling at the start.
- Blade of maceA whole flake of the aril from a nutmeg, sold as blade mace at spice merchants. About a quarter teaspoon of ground mace substitutes, but add it with the flour rather than leaving it to be strained out.
- The raw chickenDiced raw breast poached in the finished soup takes six to eight minutes and no longer. If it goes in with the vegetables at the start it will be dry and stringy by the time the soup is strained.
- StrainingThe apple and vegetables are flavouring, not garnish. Press them through a sieve for body, or push the lot through a food mill; leaving them whole gives a chunky soup that is not what the proportions intend.
- Butter and flourA third of a cup of flour to five cups of stock is a fairly heavy binding by modern taste. Scaling the roux back by a third gives a soup that coats a spoon without setting as it cools.
- YieldRoughly six cups finished, or four to six servings. Rice, boiled separately and spooned into the plate, is the usual accompaniment and is assumed rather than stated here.
Mulligatawny comes from the Tamil milagu-tannir, pepper water, a thin spiced broth of southern India that British households in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rebuilt into a thick, floury, meat-bearing soup. By the time it reached Boston it had passed through English cookery books twice over, which is why this version leans on a roux, a curry powder bought by the tin, and an apple, a sweetening trick English cooks had adopted for curries generally. Its presence in a school text says something about how thoroughly the dish had been naturalised: readers were not expected to know anything about Madras, only how to make white stock and a smooth thickening.