Mulligatawny Soup
This soup is a British-Indian cuisine hybrid, the result of colonizers’ encounters with rasam — a spiced, soupy dish often enriched with lentils, sometimes served over rice — from Tamil Nadu, a region in southern India. “Milagu tannir,” which means pepper water, was how Tamil people described some versions of rasam; it morphed into mulligatawny when the British made it thick, chunky and meaty. In the cookbook “Classic Indian Cooking,” the author Julie Sahni wrote that she fell in love with mulligatawny when she first encountered it in Germany. “The present version bears no resemblance whatever to the traditional rasam,” she said, adding, “Because of its unorthodox origin, Indian cooks have had a field day exercising their creative genius with it.” This version is thickened with a roux, masoor dal and coconut milk, and bolstered with chicken thighs and tart apple. Curry powder is not a traditional Indian ingredient, but it reflects the dish’s British influence.
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