week 10: “that’s good mulligatawatamy!”

March 10, 2009

“i’ve never seen maggie so excited for a class. she was literally bouncing up and down,” pete told joel the sunday after the international soup class. we were crowded in pete’s kitchen with the dogs, and joel and i were prepping the ingredients for mulligatawny, a simple yet flavorful curry-scented soup that had caught my eye when i printed out the recipes for lab that week.

as a kid, soup was something magical for me. i have powerful memories of eating new england-style clam chowder in boston, egg drop soup at my favorite chinese restaurant, creamy chicken and wild rice soup, french onion soup in a bulbous tureen with a bubbly gruyère crust on top, overflowing minestrone packed with vegetables and beans, lentil soup and crusty bread on cold night. anytime i would see soup on the menu at a restaurant, i’d order it.

as a (sort of) grown-up, soup is my culinary playground. i love to discover new ways to serve a meal in a bowl. and on international soup day, i immediately asked for the chance to prepare mulligatawny and (french) onion soup–known simply as onion soup to a frenchman, of course.

i’m sure mulligatawny is not new to many of you; it does, after all, appear in the reprinted version of the good housekeeping cookbook–also known as a snapshot of Middle America’s kitchen. still, its simplicity immediately appealed to me. and my excitement was reinforced by Chef’s words in lecture that day: “with that mulligatawny, you need to give it a little love if you want it to be good.”

pete will give a sauce all the love and attention in needs and then some, but when it came to experimental soups, he was less than thrilled. “go crazy, marge,” he said, after i tapped his shoulder and excitedly whispered my soup selections for that day. the main source of excitement for pete was making sauce velouté, which would serve to thicken the soup.

velouté, one of the five mother sauces we learned a few weeks before, is white (chicken, veal or fish) stock thickened with white roux. what i like about velouté is, while it doesn’t look like much by itself, it is the base for so many soups and small sauces like bercy (shallots, white wine, butter and parsley–lovely with fish) or supreme (chicken velouté and cream). last month, i spoke to Kendall chef-instructor Dina Altieri about the mother sauces. when i asked her how she responds to students’ complaints that sauces like béchamel, espagnole and velouté are outdated, she said:

“when i’m teaching cuisine 101, the material almost always includes heavy doses of the mother sauces and what their purpose is: for example, what does [auguste] escoffier use a béchamel or velouté for? and then you realize, ‘oh wow, he used thinned down versions of those as soup bases!’ this makes you realize that we can’t really snuff off those mother sauces when we go to the finest restaurants in the country and sit down to a beautiful cream of mushroom soup that traditionally would have béchamel- or velouté-based.”

that said, a perfect velouté is flavored with homemade stock, and it is smooth–meaning free of any floury lumps. a smooth sauce is achieved by gradually adding blond roux to warm stock and then whisking constantly while you bring the mixture to a boil to ensure there is no remaining raw flour taste. you then let it simmer and reduce a little, until it takes on the consistency of thin yogurt.

“put some melted butter over that velouté so it doesn’t form a skin on top,” Chef instructed, since the velouté would sit for a time while we sautéed the apples and onions for the mulligatawny. indeed, i found as i drew melted butter ribbons across the top of my sauce and carefully swirled them in no skin formed on top as it sat.

i small diced onions and apples, which i then cooked in a little butter.

i then added more curry than i’d planned, which turned out to be just short of what i needed (“you shouldn’t really have to measure with soup. i don’t,” Chef said, much to my delight). a few extra pinches later, the mixture took on a lovely golden tint.

pete added the velouté next, and we brought the soup to a bubble before turning it down to a simmer.

20 minutes later, it looked something like this:

mulligatawny traditionally is garnished with julienned chicken and a little cooked white rice. and, of course, a few apple slices in the center.

my classmate adrienne loves to walk around the different stations, tasting what everyone else made in comparison to her own dishes. mulligatawny was foreign to her as well, but she nonetheless plunged her little tasting spoon into our plated bowl, asking, “what is this?” as she brought it up to taste. “mulligatawny,” i replied.

“well that’s good mulligatawatamy!” she said.