Home › Soup Recipes › Mulligatawny
Mulligatawny
½ lbs. lean mutton 2 ozs. (4 tablespoonfuls) butter or drippings 3 pints (6 cups) cold water or stock 2 onions I sour apple 4 tablespoonfuls chopped ham 1½ small carrot 1½ small turnip 1 dessertspoonful curry powder 1 teaspoonful curry paste 1½ ozs. (6 tablespoonfuls) flour 1/2 pint (I cup) hot milk 1 tablespoonful chutney 1 bunch herbs Salt and pepper to taste I lemon Boiled rice Wipe the meat and cut it in small pieces.
Melt the butter or drippings in a saucepan, add to it the apple and vegetables cut in small pieces, and cook for five minutes over the fire. Add the curry powder, curry paste, chutney and flour, and mix well; then add the water or stock, meat, herbs, salt and pepper. Stir over the fire for five minutes and then simmer for two hours, skimming when necessary. When ready, strain through a fine sieve into a basin. Lift out the best pieces of the meat for serving in the soup and rub as much as possible of the remainder through the sieve.
Rinse out the saucepan and return the soup to it with the meat. Season carefully, add one tablespoonful of lemon juice and the hot milk just before serving. Serve the soup with plain boiled rice. If liked a lemon cut in quarters may also be handed.
The addition of a little cream is a great improvement to this soup. Mulligatawny signifies pepper-water. It seems to have come into fashion at the time Dr. Kitchener wrote his famous "Cook's Oracle." He
An Anglo-Indian curry soup built on a long-simmered mutton stock, thickened with flour and finished with milk and lemon. It is a two-hour project that rewards patience at the sieve.
- Quantities to checkThe meat is a pound and a half of lean mutton and the flour an ounce and a half (about 6 tablespoons); the fractions in the ingredient column have not survived cleanly. Carrot and turnip are one small each. Treat the list as a guide and season by taste at the end.
- MuttonMature mutton is rarely sold in the United States. Lamb shoulder or neck, cut in small pieces, gives the closest result; it will be milder and needs less than the full two hours, closer to ninety minutes.
- Curry powder and pasteCommercial British curry powder of the period was a mild, turmeric-heavy blend; curry paste was an oil-based preparation of similar spices. A dessertspoonful is two teaspoons. Use a madras-style powder and substitute another teaspoon of powder bloomed in the fat if you have no paste.
- Bloom the spice in fatThe curry powder, paste, chutney and flour go into the buttered vegetables and are mixed well before any liquid is added, though the recipe gives no cooking time for this stage. Raw curry powder stirred into stock tastes dusty; a short time in the hot fat helps.
- The milk goes in lastAdd the hot milk (and any cream) off the boil, just before serving. Acid from the apple, chutney and lemon juice will curdle milk held at a simmer, and reheating the finished soup hard will do the same.
- Straining and returning the meatPassing the solids through a sieve is what gives the body; a food mill or a short blitz with a stick blender before straining saves considerable effort. Reserve the neatest pieces of meat and put them back into the strained soup.
- The apple and chutneyA genuinely sour cooking apple such as Bramley or Granny Smith is meant here, not a sweet eating apple. With a sweet mango chutney the soup tips toward cloying, so taste before adding the tablespoonful of lemon juice.
- Yield and servingThree pints of liquid, simmered for two hours, will serve about six as a first course. Plain boiled rice is served alongside or spooned into the bowl, and a lemon cut in quarters may be handed as well if liked.
Mulligatawny comes from the Tamil milagu-tannir, pepper-water, the thin peppery broth of southern India that British households in Madras adapted into a thickened, meaty soup fit for a European dinner service. The version here is thoroughly anglicised: mutton, flour, milk, a sour apple and bottled chutney, with rice handed separately rather than cooked in. The reference to Dr. William Kitchiner, whose Cook's Oracle appeared in 1817 and went through many editions, reflects a common claim that his book helped fix the dish in English cookery; the soup was certainly known to Anglo-Indian kitchens before that, and mulligatawny recipes circulated in English print before 1817, so the attribution is best read as traditional rather than settled. By the time this book was written, mulligatawny was a standard entry in British soup chapters, the reliable exotic option for a cook wanting something different.