Culinary jottings

This preparation, originally peculiar to Southern India, derives its name from two Tamil words — molegoo (pepper), and tunnee (water). In its simple form, as partaken of by the poorer natives of Madras, it is, as its name indicates, a " pepper-water" or soupe maigre, which Mootoosamy makes as follows : — He pounds together a dessertspoonful of tamarind, six red chillies, six cloves of garlic, a tea-spoonful of mustard seed, a salt-spoonful of fenugreek seed, twelve black peppercorns, a tea-spoonful of salt, and six leaves of haray-pauh. When worked to a paste, he adds a pint of water, and boils the mixture for a quarter of an hour. While this is going on, he cuts up two small onions, puts them into a chatty, and fries them in a dessert-spoonful of ghee till they begin to turn brown, when he strains the pepper- water into the chatty, and cooks the mixture for five minutes, after which it is ready. The pepper-water is, of course, eaten with a large quantity of boiled rice, and is a meal in itself. The English, taking their ideas from this simple composition, added other condiments, with chicken, mutton, &c., thickened the liquid with flour and butter, and by degrees succeeded in concocting a soupe grasse of a decidedly acceptable kind. Oddly enough, we undoubtedly get the best mulligatunny now-a-days in England, where it is presented in the form of a clear, as well as in that of a thick, soup. In an artistic point of view, the former is infinitely the better of the two, as I shall endeavour to explain later on. N'evertheless, the thick is by no means to be despised. The superiority of the English adaptation needs bnt little explanation, for it may safely be attributed to the fact that the soup is composed upon a really strong foundation in the shape of stock, an important point that most Indian cooks slur over. This reminds me of an anecdote, which an old friend and fellow-enthusiast on the subject of cookery, communicated to me as follows : — He was at home on furlough, and happened to visit an old uncle, whose early years had been spent in the Navy. The Admiral (for the old gentleman had attained that rank) was of a somewhat dictatorial nature, and had acquired a habit of asserting his opinions with a closed fist and vehement superlatives. Conversation one day turned upon mulligatunny, and the ancient mariner declared vociferously that he had never tasted the soup properly made since serving in the West Indies in the Fenelopc frigate in the year 1823, angrily shutting up his nephew for daring to observe that it could be fairly well prepared in the East. Now, my friend was far too wise in his generation to contradict his uncle, " but," said he, " I determined to circumvent him." Accordingly Avhen, after some little time, the Admiral went up to London, he was lured into an ambuscade at his nephew's house. " I made the mulligatunny myself," said my friend, " the basis of which Avas a good veal stock, prepared, of course, the previous day. My method of procedure was as follows : — I cut up a large sweet onion into fine rings, and fried them in two ounces of good butter, till about to turn yellow. I then stirred in three table-spoonfuls of Barrie's Madras mulligatunny paste, adding sufficient stock to bring tlie mixture to the consistency of mayonnaise sauce.