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Mulligatawny, Mudlear-Chandra
Lift up breasts from a good fat grouse and keep on a plate. Draw, remove head and feet, then cut everything in small pieces. Place them in roasting pan with a sliced each carrot and onion, two sliced branches celery, a blade each thyme and marjoram, a bay leaf, clove, teaspoon each allspice and whole black pepper, pour two tablespoons lard over all and set in oven for twenty-five minutes, stirring once in a while. Remove, place entire contents of pan in mortar and thoroughly pound it. Transfer to a saucepan, add a pound veal bones and two branches each parsley and chervil. Moisten with three and a half quarts water, two gills demi-glace, season with two teaspoons salt, and let gently boil for one and a half hours. Cut two sound onions, one seedless green pepper and two leeks into small squares, place in a saucepan with a tablespoon melted butter and fry for five minutes. Cut breasts in small pieces and add to soup, cook for five minutes, add one and a half teaspoons curry powder and mix well. Strain broth through a cheese-cloth into this pan, lightly mix, then boil for twenty minutes. Add two ounces raw rice, one peeled and cored apple cut in small pieces, let gently boil for forty-five minutes, skim fat from surface, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A game-bird mulligatawny built on a browned carcass stock rather than a simple broth. The method is clear enough once you see that the pan of roasted bones is only a flavour vehicle — everything is strained out before the finished soup comes together.
- Read the order of operations firstThe diced onion, pepper and leek are sweated in one saucepan; the raw breast meat goes in with them, then the curry powder, and the strained bird-and-veal broth is poured over that. The roasted carcass and aromatics are discarded with the straining cloth.
- A gill is half a cupTwo gills of demi-glace is one cup. That is a substantial amount of reduced brown sauce; a good jarred or frozen demi-glace works, or reduce a cup of strong beef stock with a spoonful of tomato paste until syrupy.
- The oven stepNo temperature is given. Twenty-five minutes to colour bones, mirepoix and two tablespoons of lard suggests a fairly hot oven; something in the region of 425F, stirred once or twice so nothing scorches, is a reasonable reading. Burnt bones make bitter stock.
- Pounding in a mortarThe recipe says to put the whole roasted contents of the pan into a mortar and pound it thoroughly. A few pulses in a food processor, or a heavy mallet and a sturdy bowl, does the job in less time.
- Grouse and its substitutesWild grouse is not a supermarket bird in the United States. Squab, pheasant, guinea fowl or two quail give the same dark, slightly gamy result; a chicken will work but the soup loses its character. Reserve the breasts raw and use everything else for the stock.
- The rice timingForty-five minutes of boiling will reduce two ounces of raw rice to near-porridge, which thickens the soup. For distinct grains, add the rice for the last 20 minutes and the apple for the last 10.
- Curry powderThe recipe stirs it in dry, after the meat and before the broth; toasting it briefly in the butter with the vegetables instead takes the raw dustiness off.
- Volume and yieldThree and a half quarts of water plus a cup of demi-glace, simmered for roughly two and a half hours in all, will reduce considerably — perhaps to something near two quarts, depending on how hard it boils. On that estimate it serves eight as a first course, six as a main.
Mulligatawny came into English cooking from Tamil miḷagu taṇṇīr — pepper water — the thin, hot broth of southern India, which British cooks in India reworked into a thickened, meat-filled soup that suited European service. It had been a fixture of British and American hotel menus long before this book appeared. The apple is a European addition rather than an Indian one. The demi-glace and the mortar-pounded carcass point to professional cookery: this is a soup written for a kitchen with a stockpot already going, not for a household cook.