No. 327

Mullagatawny Soup, Indian Style

Potage Mullagatawny a l'Indienne

Put eight quarts of broth into a saucepan with two knuckles of veal, sawed crosswise into four pieces, and some fragments of chicken; boil, skim and add a bunch of parsley garnished with bay leaf and a clove of garlie; season with salt, pepper, mace and cloves; boil slowly for three hours, then remove the veal knuckles and cut off all the meat adhering to the bones, and set it under a weight to press it to a quarter of an inch thick and let get cool and cut up into quarter of inch squares. Strain the broth through a sieve, and skim off the fat. Have half a pound of carrots, half a pound of turnips, half a pound of onions, two ounces of knob celery, six apples and four ounces of ham, all well minced, adding one pound of boneless chicken meat, after removing the skin and fat, and cutting it in five-eighths inch squares. Put six ounces of butter into a saucepan, heat it well, then begin first by frying the onions, afterward the carrots, turnips, ham, knob celery, apples and chicken. When all are fried and slightly colored, add to them six tablespoonfuls of flour, mixing it in well, then dilute with the broth, let boil and continue to boil until every article is well cooked; season and add three teaspoonfuls of curry, and a little sugar, drain, remove the pieces of chicken and press the vegetables through a sieve. Put this puree back into the saucepan, return it to the fire with the veal and chicken, and stir from the bottom of the saucepan until boiling point. Let simmer for twenty-five minutes, taste and see if the seasoning be correct, then serve. Send to the table at the same time, some rice boiled in salted water, mixing in some lard or butter.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer is cooking for a Delmonico's service, not a household: eight quarts of broth and two veal knuckles will yield something like twenty to twenty-four servings. Everything below scales down cleanly by quarter or half, and the method is worth keeping intact even at small volume.

Scale it downEight quarts of stock, one pound of chicken meat and two veal knuckles is a restaurant batch. A quarter recipe — 2 quarts broth, 4 oz chicken, 2 oz each of the root vegetables, 1.5 tablespoons flour, scant 1 teaspoon curry — gives five or six bowls and behaves the same way; a single veal shank is more than a strict quarter of the veal but is the smallest practical amount to buy.
Knuckles of vealThese are veal shanks, the same cut sold as osso buco, asked of the butcher sawn across into four. They are here for gelatin as much as meat; the broth should set to a soft jelly when cold. Veal shank remains available but is expensive, and beef shank will give a heavier, darker soup.
Knob celeryCeleriac, sold as celery root. Not celery stalk, which has neither the starch nor the depth. Two ounces is a small wedge off a large root.
The order of frying mattersOnions first, then carrots, turnips, ham, celeriac, apples, chicken — the sequence runs from the vegetable that needs the longest colouring to the ones that would fall apart or scorch. Keep the heat moderate; "slightly colored" means blond, not browned, or the finished purée turns muddy.
Curry powderThree teaspoons in eight quarts is very restrained by modern taste, and nineteenth-century commercial curry powders were often milder and more turmeric-led than many sold now, though blends varied a good deal. Add it toward the end as written, taste, and adjust — but bloom it briefly in the fat rather than stirring it into liquid, which leaves it raw-tasting.
The applesSix apples for eight quarts. Use a firm tart variety that breaks down without turning to sweet mush — Granny Smith, Bramley, or similar. They supply most of the acidity in a soup that otherwise has none, so do not substitute a sweet eating apple and then add the sugar as well.
Pressing the vealPicking the shank meat, pressing it flat under a weight until cold and then dicing it is a professional trick for getting clean squares out of meat that would otherwise shred. It is cosmetic, and skipping it costs nothing but neatness.
Sieving"Press the vegetables through a sieve" produces a smoother, lighter body than a blender, which shears the starch and can make the soup gluey. If you use a blender, pulse briefly and pass it through a fine strainer afterward.
ServingThe rice goes to the table separately, buttered, to be spooned in by the diner — not cooked in the soup, where it would swell and thicken it past recognition. Serve the soup thin enough to pour.

A Little History

Mullagatawny is the most thoroughly naturalised of the Anglo-Indian dishes: the name comes from the Tamil miḷagu taṇṇīr, pepper water, a thin peppery broth of southern India that British households in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rebuilt as a substantial meat soup. By the time Charles Ranhofer set it down in The Epicurean (1894), the record of his decades in the Delmonico's kitchens in New York, it had passed through English cookbooks so often that his version owes far more to French stockpot technique than to anything in Madras — a veal-knuckle consommé, a butter-and-flour liaison, vegetables sweated in sequence and forced through a sieve, with curry powder and apple standing in for the whole of the original seasoning. That he labels it à l'Indienne tells you what "Indian style" signified on a fashionable American menu of the period: curry powder, rice served alongside, and otherwise the classical French repertoire.