Home › The World's Kitchen › Mulligatawney, Manila
Mulligatawney, Manila
Have the following articles ready: Half sliced carrot, one medium sliced onion, half medium sliced turnip, one sliced leek, one branch sliced white celery, one sliced parsley root, quarter of medium sliced eggplant, two sprigs bay leaf, one of thyme, two medium, ripe, sliced tomatoes, two sliced shallots, one bean sound, crushed garlic, one sound, sliced apple, one sliced green pepper, half ounce lean raw ham or bacon cut into small dice pieces, two cloves and one piece lemon rind.
Heat one ounce butter in a saucepan, add all the above ingredients and gently brown them for five minutes, mixing well with the spatule. Add one tablespoon flour, mix all well and allow to briskly cook for eight minutes, mixing with the spatule once in a while. Moisten with two and a half quarts hot broth. Mix well with a spoon; season with a light tablespoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper, a light saltspoon cayenne pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg, adding one good teaspoon curry powder diluted in a little water. Mix well again with the spoon and let gently simmer for one hour. Skim the fat off the surface; pass it through a strainer into another saucepan; add a tablespoon cocoanut milk or a tablespoon sweet cream, two tablespoons boiled rice and two tablespoons cooked chicken cut into very small dice; mix a little while heating, but be very careful not to allow the soup to boil again after the cocoanut has been added. Pour into a hot soup tureen and serve.
A vegetable-heavy curry soup built as a French veloute, strained smooth, then finished with rice, chicken and coconut. Nothing here is difficult; the list is just long, and a few of the measures need translating.
- Do not boil after the coconutThe recipe's closing instruction is the hinge. Coconut milk and cream can break when boiled in an acidic, curry-spiced liquid, leaving the soup grainy with an oily film. Bring it only to a bare steam once the finish goes in.
- Saltspoon and "light tablespoon"A saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon. "Light" means a slightly under-filled spoon, so read this as a scant tablespoon of salt -- and taste at the end instead, since a broth that has already been seasoned will not need the full amount.
- "One bean, sound, crushed garlic"Most plausibly a single sound clove of garlic, crushed. "Sound" applied to the apple and garlic simply means unblemished.
- Parsley root and spatuleParsley root (Hamburg parsley) is sold at some farmers' markets and East European groceries; a small parsnip plus a handful of parsley stems is the usual stand-in. A spatule is a flat wooden spoon or spatula, nothing more.
- The flour stageEight minutes of brisk cooking with a tablespoon of flour among that much wet vegetable is meant to cook out the raw starch taste, not to build a roux colour. Keep it moving and lower the heat if the flour catches on the pan bottom.
- Curry powderCommercial curry powder of this period was generally a mild, turmeric-forward Anglo-Indian blend. One teaspoon in 2.5 quarts is very restrained by modern taste; a tablespoon of a good blend, bloomed in the butter with the vegetables, is closer to what the name promises.
- StrainingThe recipe says only to pass the soup through a strainer into another saucepan; how much of the vegetable you press through is left to you. A blender would give a thick puree rather than a strained soup.
- YieldSomewhat under the two and a half quarts of broth added, after an hour's simmer and straining, or roughly eight to ten first-course servings. The two tablespoons each of rice and chicken are a token garnish; four to six times that makes it a supper dish.
Mulligatawny comes from the Tamil milagu thanni, generally translated as "pepper water" -- a thin, sour, peppery South Indian broth that British households in India rebuilt into a thickened, meat-garnished soup over the course of the nineteenth century. The method itself is pure French professional cooking -- brown the aromatics in butter, dust with flour, moisten with broth, simmer, strain -- with curry powder, coconut milk and rice grafted on. The result is less an Indian soup than a record of how grand-hotel kitchens absorbed everything they met.