Home › The World's Kitchen › Mulligatawny, Chitty
Mulligatawny, Chitty
Pick, singe and draw a good fat grouse, remove meat from bones, then cut in quarter-inch-square pieces and keep on a plate until required. Chop up bones, place in saucepan with a sliced each carrot and onion, two sliced branches celery, a branch parsley, sprig thyme and two cloves. Pour in a pint broth and two gills demi-glace, lightly mix, let boil for thirty-five minutes and keep hot. Cut an onion, green pepper, two leeks and two ounces raw lean ham in small square pieces, place in saucepan with grouse meat, a tablespoon butter, and gently brown for ten minutes, stirring once in a while. Add a teaspoon curry powder, stir well, strain grouse broth through strainer into pan, add two and a half quarts of broth, two ounces raw rice, a peeled and cored apple cut in small squares, three slices peeled eggplant cut same way and two finely chopped, peeled, red tomatoes. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, let gently boil for forty-five minutes, skim fat off surface, pour soup into a tureen and serve.
A game-bird mulligatawny built in two stages: a quick stock from the carcass, then a long-simmered soup. The instructions assume a cook who already has demi-glace and stock on hand.
- Gills and quartsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of demi-glace is one cup. Adding the pint of broth and the later two and a half quarts, the total liquid is a little over three quarts, enough for roughly ten to twelve first-course servings.
- Demi-glaceClassically espagnole (the thickened brown sauce) combined with brown veal or beef stock and reduced by half. A cup of well-reduced brown stock, or a tablespoon of good commercial demi-glace concentrate dissolved in a cup of stock, does the same work: it gives the soup body and colour that the thin grouse stock cannot.
- The bird"Pick, singe and draw" describes a bird bought whole and unplucked. A dressed grouse today weighs around a pound and yields little meat; two quail, a small partridge, or a pound of boned duck or dark chicken thigh will substitute, though only true game gives the intended flavour.
- Bloom the curry powderThe curry powder goes in with the browned meat and vegetables before any liquid, and is stirred well. That brief contact with hot butter is what takes the raw, dusty edge off the spice, and later simmering does not do the same job.
- A timid teaspoonOne teaspoon of curry powder for over three quarts is very mild by modern taste. A tablespoon is nearer what a modern palate is likely to want; add it in stages and taste.
- Ambiguous eggplant"Three slices peeled eggplant" gives no thickness. Somewhere between half a cup and a cup of small dice is a reasonable reading; more than that and the eggplant collapses into the broth during the forty-five-minute simmer.
- Rice and the long boilTwo ounces of raw rice, about a third of a cup, is deliberately sparse: this is a soup, not a pilaf. Over forty-five minutes the grains soften considerably and will keep swallowing liquid if the soup is held or reheated, so thin it with more stock before serving a second day.
- SkimmingThe direction to skim the fat comes after the simmer for a reason: grouse and raw ham both render fat, and a soup this lean-tasting is spoiled by a slick on the surface. Chilling the soup and lifting the set fat is the tidier route if time allows.
Mulligatawny is generally traced to the Tamil miḷagu taṇṇīr, "pepper water," a thin spiced broth that British households in southern India absorbed and steadily enriched until it became a substantial meat soup with rice, apple and curry powder. By the time it reached American hotel kitchens it was a standing item on grand-menu soup lists, and cooks improvised endless variants on the same frame — mutton, chicken, veal, turtle, and here game. The word "Chitty" in the title goes unexplained in the book. What the recipe really documents is the professional kitchen's habit of turning a single grouse into two preparations at once: the bones into stock, the flesh into garnish, with nothing left over.</p>