Senior center’s mulligatawny soup, tasty and fun to say

Upcoming Monday Munches at the Charlotte Senior Center, where you are invited to enjoy meals served from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

Monday, Feb. 24
Mulligatawny soup, Caesar salad, rolls and cake.

Monday, March 3
Lasagna, green salad and dessert (TBA).

To enjoy the mulligatawny soup at the Charlotte Senior Center, start by enjoying just saying it: mulligatawny, mulligatawny. Hoorah!

“The Oxford Companion to Food” describes mulligatawny as Ango-Indian cookery, the name coming from mullaga-tawny, pepper water. By the end of the 18th century, the spicy soup was popular with employees of the East India Company, and when families returned to their homes in Britain, they brought the recipe with them.

William Kitchiner, a celebrity chef whose 1817 cookbook, “The Cook’s Oracle” was a bestseller in Britain and the United States, offered 11 ketchup recipes, a recipe for wow-wow sauce (beef stock with port, wine vinegar, parsley, pickled cucumbers or pickled walnuts, mustard, mushroom ketchup, flour and butter) and a recipe for mulligatawny soup.

In September 1859, writing about an African trip, a Scottish physician, missionary and explorer obsessed with learning the source of the Nile, Dr. David Livingstone, suggested an illness he’d suffered was the result of the cook adding mulligatawny paste to the soup “rather rashly.”

One might guess that “The Escoffier Cook Book,” by famed chef Georges Auguste Escoffier, would not have anything to say about mulligatawny. But surprise, surprise: Recipe #748 offers directions for preparing soupe mulligatawny. To prepare this, you need a small fowl plus sliced carrots, onions, mushroom peelings, white consommé and curry. The French touch comes with the instruction, “When ready to serve, add a few tablespoons of cream.”

For those of a political bent, in Economic and Political Weekly (Aug. 7, 2010), Modhumita Roy’s “Some Like It Hot: Class, Gender and Empire in the Making of Mulligatawny Soup,” offers the opportunity to think about the histories of cultural exchange, revealing the linkages between food, identity and power.

“No purveyor of domestic advice in the 19th century could afford to ignore the mulligatawny soup. … All the great writers of cookery books of that period had their own recipe for the soup, the most celebrated of Anglo-Indian dishes.”

East Indian merchants returning to Britain set off a craze for the soup. Even Heinz in the U.S. got into the act. They put the soup in cans, added “beef curry” to the label and sold it in Britain. These days, we can’t find mulligatawny on our local grocery store shelves, but Amazon offers Heinz classic mulligatawny — made in Britain. It contains water, tomatoes, apples, beef, rice, sugar, modified cornflower, vegetable oil, curry powder, wheat flour, salt, flavorings, color and plain caramel.

In 1861, Mrs. Beeton’s “Book of Household Management” contained pickles. Other recipes of the period contained pickled mango, grated coconut and stewed calf’s head. One writer advised that calves’ feet can be substituted to reduce the cost, or just use calves’ scalp or skin. A recipe from the chief cook to Queen Victoria called for onions, unpeeled apples, poultry, game or pork, along with curry paste.

In our own times, a Seinfield Soup Nazi classic that first aired November 1995 offers a look at what happens when Jerry Seinfeld gets hungry for soup. Along with the hijinks at the soup counter, there’s a recipe for mulligatawny containing potatoes, celery, eggplant, frozen corn, tomato sauce, pistachios, cashews, parsley, lemon juice, sugar, pepper, sea salt, thyme, bay leaf and, yes, curry.

In the preface to Jesse Conrad’s cookbook, “A Handbook of Cookery for a Small Planet,” the author Joseph Conrad praised “the conscientious preparation of the simple food of everyday life” rather than the “concoction of idle feasts and rare dishes.” He offered his disturbing version of “you are what you eat,” claiming the diet of America’s indigenous population explained their “savageness.”

Today, we’d do better not to worry about what other people eat and instead confront the issue of what happens when people have nothing to eat. On Feb. 12, The Wall Street Journal posted the number of 4 billion pounds, explaining: This is the weight of U.S.-grown grains, soybeans, lentils, rice and other commodity staples that American farmers sold through Food for Peace in 2022. The food-aid program is administered by USAID, which has been largely closed by the Trump administration in recent weeks.

Note: According to Webster’s Dictionary, the term mulligatawny was first used in 1784. Webster’s also provides a fascinating glimpse of other words first appearing that same year. Some will surprise you with their very modern ring: attatudinize, camp follower, neurosis, riot act.

This group of words comes close to offering a contemporary political headline. Rest assured that there’s no politics involved in accepting the invitation to eat Monday Munch at the Charlotte Senior Center: One Monday offers mulligatawny, and the next presents lasagna, which needs no introduction.

Let us give thanks to those volunteer cooks and dishwashers who make this good eating possible.

Note: Here’s a free link to a Washington Post story. It has nothing to do with food but is about someone “doing good,” and right now we all need as many “feel-good” stories as we can get.