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Lobster Mulligatawny
(England.) Cook 2 ounces of chopped ham, 1 carrot, 1 onion, 1 bayleaf, some parsley, 1 ounce of butter. Add two pounds of boiled lobster, cut into dice, 1 quart of veal stock, 1 spoonful of sherry, 1 ounce of flour mixed with 1 ounce of butter, a tablespoonful of curry powder, then cook 1/2 hour. Add the yolks of 2 eggs and 1/2 cup of hot cream, press through a sieve, and serve with a dish of boiled rice.
LENTEN BROTH (as made in the convents of France and Austria.). Cook 2 pounds of flounders or any white fish, cut up, with 1 carrot, 1 onion, 1 turnip, 2 pieces of celery, and a bunch of herbs, with 1 quart of water, for 2 hours. Take out the fish, remove skin and bones, and put the fish back again, add 1 pint of boiling milk, mixed with flour and butter, the yolk of an egg and juice of a lemon, salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Press through a sieve and serve hot.
FISH BROTH (as made in Sweden.).
Take the water in which a large fresh fish has been boiled, add any scraps or gravy, left over; reduce by boiling to 1 quart. Strain it, add 1 leek, 6 potatoes, 1 carrot, cut up, a bayleaf, and some parsley. Simmer for 1/2 hour, add 1 pint of hot white stock, salt, pepper, a tablespoonful of sherry, and 12 oysters. Cook ten minutes more and serve.
Three related soups run together on one page; the mulligatawny is the anchor, with a French/Austrian fish broth and a Swedish one following. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how a thickened, egg-enriched soup behaves.
- The hinge: the egg and cream liaisonOnce the yolks and hot cream go in, the soup must not simmer again. Beat the yolks with the cream, temper with a ladle of hot soup, return it off the heat and bring it back only to about 175F, stirring, or it will curdle into threads.
- "Press through a sieve"Ambiguous as written. The usual Victorian reading is that the vegetables, ham and a portion of the lobster are worked through a fine sieve to thicken and flavour the soup, with the best diced lobster meat reserved and added back to the strained liquid. Pushing all two pounds of lobster through would leave you with paste.
- Two pounds of lobsterAmbiguous. It may mean two pounds of cooked lobster in the shell, which would yield only around 6 to 8 oz of picked meat; "cut into dice" could equally point to picked meat. Two pounds of picked meat would give a stew rather than a soup, so the smaller reading is the safer one.
- "1 spoonful of sherry"Unspecified, and the same book uses "tablespoonful" elsewhere when it means one. Read it as a tablespoon and adjust at the end; a dry amontillado or fino suits curry better than cream sherry.
- Curry powderCommercial curry powders of this period were generally milder and, by most accounts, heavier on turmeric and coriander than many sold now. Cook the tablespoonful in the butter with the ham and vegetables for a minute before the liquid goes in, or the raw spice will stay gritty on the palate.
- Flour and butterThe equal ounces of flour and butter are a beurre manié, worked cold into a paste and whisked into the hot liquid in pieces. Do not tip in dry flour.
- Veal stockA light unsalted chicken stock is the nearest ordinary substitute. Fish stock or lobster shell stock is arguably better here, though it takes the dish away from the original's veal base.
- Oysters in the Swedish brothTen minutes will shrink them to rubber. Add shucked oysters with their liquor at the very end and give them one to two minutes, just until the edges ruffle.
- YieldRoughly six first-course servings, with the boiled rice served alongside.
Mulligatawny came into English cooking from Tamil, from words generally translated as "pepper water" — the thin, sour, spiced broth of southern India, which British households in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rebuilt as a thick curried soup with stock, flour, cream and rice. By this period it was firmly a British dish rather than an Indian one, which is why this book files it under "(England.)" without apology. Substituting lobster for the usual mutton or chicken signals the more expensive end of the table. The neighbouring convent broth and Swedish fish soup show the same period habit of finishing almost any fish soup with egg yolk, cream or milk and a squeeze of lemon.