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February 19
Menu: Mulligatawney Soup; Roast Pork, Frozen Apple Sauce; Potatoes Creamed Onions; Indian Salad; Toasted Biscuits; Mocha Souffle; Coffee; Cheese Mulligatawney Soup-Saute in 1 tablespoon melted Crisco, 1 minced onion, 1 tablespoon minced cooked ham, 3 cloves, 1/2 carrot, and 1 stick celery, minced fine, 1½ cup cooked chicken cut in dice, and 3 pints of chicken stock. Cook fifteen minutes, add ½ a green apple, diced, 2 cup stewed or canned tomatoes, 1 teaspoon tomato catsup, 1 teaspoon curry powder, 2 tablespoons boiled rice, 1 teaspoon salt, and 2 drops Tabasco sauce. Simmer 1/2 hour and serve with or without thin slices of lemon cut in quarters.
The soup is sound but the punctuation is not: as printed, the whole ingredient list appears to be sautéed, stock included. Read the first sentence as two steps.
- Fix the sequence firstSauté only the onion, ham, cloves, carrot and celery in the melted fat until the onion is soft, then add the diced chicken and the 3 pints of stock and cook fifteen minutes. Everything after that goes in for the half-hour simmer.
- CriscoA hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold, though reformulated in 2007 to cut trans fats. Any neutral oil or butter works here; a tablespoon of fat for a pot this size is only enough to sweat the vegetables.
- "2 cup" tomatoesAlmost certainly 2 cups, as with the 1½ cup chicken above; the book is inconsistent about plurals. Canned tomatoes with their juice are the closest match.
- Bloom the curry powderA single teaspoon in three pints of stock is faint by modern taste, and raw curry powder stirred into liquid tastes dusty. Add it to the fat with the aromatics so it fries for a minute, and expect to want two or three teaspoons of a decent Madras blend.
- The clovesThree whole cloves are meant to be fished out before serving, or at least warned about. Tie them with the celery in a scrap of cheesecloth if you would rather not hunt.
- Rice and appleTwo tablespoons of cooked rice is a garnish, not a body-builder; it will soften to nothing over half an hour. For texture, stir it in at the end. The green apple is traditional and does the work of the tartness the recipe otherwise lacks.
- YieldAbout two and a half quarts once the tomatoes go in, or eight generous first-course servings. It keeps well and improves overnight, though the curry deepens noticeably.
- The lines that follow"February 20" and everything after it belong to a menu, not to this soup. Onion cocktail, halibut and roast mutton are separate courses of a separate dinner.
Mulligatawny is an anglicisation of the Tamil miḷagu taṇṇi, roughly "pepper water", and is generally traced to the kitchens of British India, where a thin South Indian peppery broth was rebuilt as a substantial meat soup for European tables. By the late nineteenth century it was fully naturalised in Britain and America, appearing in household manuals with chicken or mutton, apple, rice and a spoonful of curry powder — the compound spice blend that stood in for the individual spices a Madras cook would have ground fresh. Its presence in a Procter & Gamble promotional cookbook is worth noting: The Story of Crisco (1913) was written to prove that a new hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening could do everything butter and lard did, so it padded its pages with a full year of dinner menus in which Crisco appears wherever fat is needed, including a single tablespoon in a soup that hardly requires it.