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Mullagatawny Soup
Put one-fourth pound of butter into a saucepan, add three or four sliced onions and fry them until done. Cut two rabbits into nice sized pieces, put them in with the onions and fry for a few minutes; then pour in three or four pints of clear broth and let it boil gently for an hour. Take the rabbit out of the saucepan, pass the onions and liquor through a fine hair sieve, return them to the stewpan, pour in one quart of broth and boil for an hour longer. Put two tablespoonfuls of flour into frying panwith a little butter and fry it until nicely browned. Stir in gradually sufficient broth or water to make a good paste. Stir the curry into the soup; add a little lemon-pickle and let it simmer gently for half an hour, stirring frequently to prevent the flour from sticking to the bottom of the saucepan. Turn the soup into a tureen and serve with it a dish of plain boiled rice.
A Victorian Anglo-Indian soup as it stood in the Waldorf kitchen, written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew the dish. Two things are missing from the text and one is a matter of arithmetic.
- The missing curryThe recipe says "stir the curry into the soup" but never tells you to add any. Curry powder belongs with the browned flour and butter — roughly one to two tablespoons, cooked in the roux for a minute before the broth goes in, which is where its flavour is developed.
- Lemon-pickleAn 18th- and 19th-century English condiment of salted, spiced lemons in vinegar or brine, not a commercial product now. Preserved lemon rind, finely minced, with a squeeze of juice, gives the same salty-sour lift; add it at the end and taste, since a little goes a long way.
- RabbitTwo rabbits means two whole dressed animals, about 5 lb total with bone. Farmed rabbit is available from good butchers; a similar weight of bone-in chicken thighs behaves much the same in the pot, though it gives a softer, less gamy broth.
- Quantities and yieldThree or four pints of broth first, another quart later — call it 5 to 6 pints of liquid and expect 8 to 10 servings. The "three or four pints" is genuinely loose; start at the lower end, since you will reduce over the recipe's two and a half hours of simmering.
- The sieveA "fine hair sieve" was horsehair mesh. A fine-mesh strainer does the job, but pushing the softened onions through with a ladle is what thickens and sweetens the base — do not just strain and discard them.
- The rabbit comes backThe recipe takes the meat out and never says to return it. Pick the flesh from the bones while the soup finishes, discard the small bones carefully, and put the meat back for the final half-hour simmer.
- The browned flourBrown the flour in butter until it is the colour of a hazelnut, no darker — past that it loses thickening power and turns bitter. Thin it with hot broth off the heat to keep it smooth before it joins the soup.
- ServingThe recipe specifies plain boiled rice in a separate dish, not as a garnish on top. Long-grain rice, cooked dry and served hot alongside so each diner spoons in as much as they want.
The name comes from the Tamil miḷagu taṇṇīr, "pepper water" — the thin, sour, peppery broth of South India that British residents encountered in the 18th century and steadily rebuilt into a thick meat soup thickened with flour and seasoned from curry powder. By the time this version was written it had been an English dish for the better part of a century, and the rabbit is a mark of that adaptation: it was the cheap, plentiful game of British kitchens, and Anglo-Indian cookery in England often swapped mutton or fowl for whatever the larder held. Lemon-pickle appears here in place of the tamarind or lime that would have soured the original. Mulligatawny was a fixture of the English repertoire a grand dining room of the 1890s would have been expected to offer, rather than an exotic novelty.