Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Lamb Soup
Lamb Soup
Cut a shoulder of lamb into moderately large pieces, place them in a stewpan with an onion and a piece of butter; fry until nicely browned then dredge in a table spoonful each of flour and curry powder, stir it all over the fire for two minutes, then pour in three quarts of broth, some trimmings of raw ham and a bunch of parsley. When the liquor boils, remove the stewpan to the side of the fire and let it simmer until the meat is cooked. When done, take the pieces of lamb out, pass the cooking liquor through a fine hair sieve, place in with it half a pound of boiled rice, and again boil gently for ten minutes. Bone the meat and put it in a soup tureen, thicken the soup with the yolks of three eggs beaten together with a little cream, then strain it through a fine colander over the meat, and serve while hot with sippets of toast or small dice of fried bread in a separate vessel such as a dish or plate.
A curried lamb broth thickened at the last moment with egg yolks and cream — closer to a Anglo-Indian mulligatawny than to a modern lamb stew. The finish is where it can go wrong.
- The hinge: the egg liaisonOnce the yolks and cream go in, the soup must never return to a boil or it will curdle into threads. Temper the yolk-cream mixture with a ladle of hot broth first, stir it into the pot off the heat, and hold it below about 180F.
- Shoulder of lambA bone-in shoulder of 3 to 4 lb is right, cut into large chunks. Boned shoulder works but you lose the gelatine the broth wants; add a lamb bone or two if you use boneless.
- "Remove to the side of the fire"On a coal range the side of the firebox was the low-heat zone. On a modern burner this means the barest simmer — figure 1 1/2 to 2 hours until the meat pulls from the bone.
- Trimmings of raw hamScraps and rind from an air-dried ham: prosciutto ends or country ham trim. They season the broth rather than being eaten, and they are salty, so hold back on salt until the soup is strained.
- Stewpan and hair sieveA stewpan is a wide, straight-sided pot; for three quarts of broth plus the meat you want a 7 to 8 quart pot or Dutch oven. A hair sieve was woven horsehair; use a fine mesh strainer or a chinois.
- Half a pound of boiled riceGenuinely ambiguous: it may mean rice weighed before or after boiling. Read as rice already boiled, half a pound is about 1 1/2 cups; read as dry weight it is roughly double that once cooked.
- Curry powderCommercial curry powder of the period was generally milder and more turmeric-forward than modern blends. A tablespoon of a modern hot blend will dominate the lamb; taste and adjust, and let it fry in the fat for the full two minutes to lose its raw edge.
- SippetsSmall triangles or dice of bread fried in butter or oil, or plain toast cut up, passed separately so they stay crisp.
- YieldThree quarts of broth plus the meat serves eight generously as a first course, six as a main.
Lamb or mutton simmered with curry powder, rice, and an egg-and-cream liaison belongs to the Anglo-Indian mulligatawny line, a dish that entered English cookery through returning East India Company households in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and had become thoroughly domesticated in British and American kitchens by the end of the nineteenth. The name is generally traced to Tamil words for pepper water, though by the time it reached English tables the fiery original had commonly been softened into a mild, thick, rice-bearing soup. The sequence is careful, well-drilled work: browned meat for flavor, ham trimmings for depth, the liquor strained clear, the meat boned and laid in the tureen so nothing gritty or bony reaches the diner, and the fried bread sent out separately so it does not go soft on the way to the table.