The empire marched on mulligatawny

Sharon is no fan of soups and this is largely due to her schooldays. Offered a bowl of mulligatawny for lunch she declined.

She said: “I was sent from Africa to England to go to school when I was about 13. It was such a shock, leaving the warm of Nigeria and suddenly finding myself in the doom and gloom of an ancient old building with long draughty corridors and no heating system. This was a boarding school for girls in Sutton Coldfield. Dinner consisted of soup. This was generally made with the leftovers of the day´s other meals. It was always coloured brown. There wasn´t anything else other than sliced bread. This was our dinner every day.

“Ever since then I have never really been keen on soup as it brings back such awful memories. That´s why I didn´t want brown mulligatawny soup. I had my daily fruit smoothie.”

Sharon doesn´t know what she is missing as mulligatawny soup, which originated in southern India, spread throughout the British Empire and it was a stalwart on menus from the frozen wastes of Canada to the jungles of Africa and the empty deserts of Australia. Here is a recipe from a colonial cookbook published in the mid 1950s.

Two pints of stock
One onion
One apple
One and a half ounces of butter or dripping
One dessertspoon of curry powder
One dessertspoon of chutney
One and a half ounces of flour
One teaspoon of lemon juice
One teaspoon of sugar
Salt to taste
Two ounces of rice

Chop the onion and apple finely and fry them in the butter or dripping until “nicely browned.” Add the curry powder, chutney and flour and mix well together before adding the stock gradually and stirring well. Add the remainder of the ingredients and stir till boiling. Reduce the heat and simmer for 20 minutes.

This is a greatly simplified version of the tasty Indian soup. The word mulligatawny is taken from two Tamil words “molegoo” (pepper) and “tunnee (water). A British officer who served in the Indian army from 1859 to 1892 described a native cook in Madras making pepper water. This was a complicated process involving the pounding together of tamarind, six red chillies, six cloves of garlic, a teaspoon of mustard seed, a salt spoonful of fenugreek seed, twelve black peppercorns, a tea spoonful of salt and six leaves of karay-pauk. A pint of water was added to this paste and boiled for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, he peeled, cut up and fried in ghee, or clarified butter, two small onions. When they were turning brown he strained the boiling liquid and added it to the pot containing the onions. This, eaten with rice, formed a complete meal. However, the English took the basic idea and created all sorts of variations, with chicken, mutton or beef added and thickening often used.

The spread of the soup across the empire is illustrated by the tale of a retired admiral who claimed that he had never tasted a mulligatawny as good as that which was served on board the Penelope frigate in the West Indies in 1823. However, he also fondly remembered mulligatawny served on the Cockatrice in 1834 on the East India station.

Other naval officers were taken prisoner in one of Britain´s Indian wars with a local ruler and they bemoaned their diet in a song from 1784:

“In vain our hard fate we repine;
In vain on our fortune we rail;
On Mullaghee-tawny we dine,
Or Congee in Bangalore Jail.”

Congee is rice porridge.

Heinz makes a very tasty tinned mulligatawny which is what Sharon declined for lunch.

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©Phillip Bruce 2009