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Mutton Broth, Indienne
Cut into very small dice pieces one medium, red carrot, one medium, sound turnip, two branches celery, one small white onion, two leeks and one pound lean, raw mutton from the leg, cut also the same way. Place all these articles in a large saucepan with two tablespoons melted butter. Cook for ten minutes, or till they are of a fine golden colour, being careful to stir with a wooden spoon quite frequently meanwhile. Add one teaspoon good curry powder, stir well; then pour in three quarts hot water. Season with two teaspoons salt, two tablespoons Worcestershire sauce. (If any mutton bones on hand add them to the soup, which will give an excellent additional flavour.) Cover the pan and let gently boil for thirty minutes. Then add one and half ounces good rice and one gill tomato sauce. Cover the pan and gently boil for forty-five minutes. Remove the bones (if any); skim the fat from the surface, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A mulligatawny-style mutton soup built on a brunoise of root vegetables and a single teaspoon of curry powder. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the quantities and one of the timings need attention.
- Bloom the curry powderThe instruction to add the curry powder to the hot fat and stir before the water goes in is the hinge of the dish. Give it 30 to 60 seconds in the butter; raw curry powder stirred into liquid tastes dusty and stays that way.
- A gillOne gill is half a cup, four fluid ounces.
- "Tomato sauce"In a book of this vintage this means a cooked, seasoned tomato purée in the French manner, not ketchup and not the modern jarred pasta sauce. Passata or a thick tomato purée thinned slightly is the closest match.
- Rice quantity and timingAn ounce and a half of rice is a scant quarter cup, correct for a broth rather than a thick soup. Forty-five minutes at a boil will reduce it to starch and cloud the liquid; long-grain rice wants 18 to 20 minutes, so let the soup simmer its remaining time and add the rice near the end.
- MuttonMutton is sheep over a year old, sold in few places now. A pound of lamb from the leg or shoulder works, though the flavour is milder; a few bones or a lamb neck slice will restore some of the depth the original assumes.
- WorcestershireTwo tablespoons is assertive by modern palates alongside the two teaspoons of added salt. Start with one tablespoon and less salt, then correct at the end.
- SkimmingSkimming hot fat off three quarts of broth is imprecise work. Chilling the soup and lifting the set fat off is cleaner, and this soup reheats well.
- YieldThe pan is covered for both stages, so losses over the hour and a quarter are modest; expect roughly six to eight servings as a first course.
The suffix Indienne in a professional kitchen of this period meant simply "with curry," one of a fixed vocabulary of garnish names that told a cook what was in the pot without describing it. This particular soup sits in the family of Anglo-Indian mutton broths that produced mulligatawny, a name generally traced to Tamil words for pepper water, and which reached European and American hotel kitchens through Britain rather than directly from India. The single teaspoon of curry powder for three quarts of liquid is characteristic: turn-of-the-century restaurant cooking treated curry as a background note in an otherwise French construction, and the diced-vegetable base, the Worcestershire, and the tomato sauce all belong squarely to that tradition. Mutton's prominence is a period marker in itself, since sheep were commonly slaughtered older then.