Mulligatawny Soup

And a continuing love affair with cabbage

Perhaps some of you are familiar with Mulligatawny Soup from Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi? This is one of the soups the “No-Soup-For-You” guy made. But have you ever wondered where the term originated? The Hobson-Jobson, a dictionary of Anglo-Indian words and terms from various Indian languages which were a part of the common parlance during the British rule in India has an entry for it: A corruption of the Tamil phrase milagu tannir (/mɪɭagʊ t̪aɳɳiːr/)*, which literally translates to pepper water. Pepper water? Huh?

Now if you look up Mulligatawny today, trying to discover what the Soup Nazi might have put into his concoction, you might find something like this: a richly-flavored chicken soup flavored with curry and thickened with rice; or a chicken soup flavored with curry, finely chopped apple, rice, and finished with a dollop of sour cream. The ingredients are as varied as the descriptions of the dish itself.  When I first encountered these descriptions, I wondered several things…sour cream in India in the days of the British Raj? Sour cream in India even today? And curry? What curry, exactly? And mixing chopped apple into a savory soup? Yikes. Ok, this last one is personal; many, many Indian dishes do mix fruit into savory preparations…pineapple gotsu (/gotsʊ/), for example, a sweetish (not from the pineapple, but because of a bit of jaggery added to it) and sour dish from the southern state of Karnataka. While I love gotsus (obviously more on those later!), I shudder at the thought of pineapple in it. That’s just me. But I digress.

What’s missing in all the recipes I looked at is lentils, the basis of any rasam, or what Mulligatawny soup actually started as.

Rasam (/ɾasam/), a Tamil and Malayalam word, is a staple in any South Indian household. Called saaru (/saːɾʊ/) in Kannada, chaaru (/cçaːɾʊ/) in Telugu, it has as many recipes as there are households in South India, and even more, since it no longer is exclusive to the south. What is common in all recipes, however, is a few ingredients: toor dhal, black pepper, cumin seeds, red chilies, a source of acid – tomatoes, tamarind, or lime. These provide the backbone, upon which there are numerous variations. But chicken? Sour cream? Rice? Apples??? No, no.

Now I mentioned last week that I am a sociolinguist whose scholarship has focused  on recognizing and celebrating diversity in languages, specifically varieties of English. Well said appreciation for diversity extends to food; I celebrate making changes in a recipe to better accommodate it to another context, celebrate new recipes coming from combinations of ingredients from different cultures, celebrate novelty. Absolutely.  I love creating new recipes based on combinations of things from different cultures – put the cabbage curry we made last week, for example, on pizza. Throw some crisp bacon bits on it if you like. The result is like no pizza you have ever had, and delicious! Or a couple of months ago, I made a pasta with a pesto made from young, tender curry leaves. That was scrumptious. Such innovations are what make cooking interesting; food change, just like language change, is inevitable and wonderful.  What I am less happy with, however, is changing something so much that the end bears no resemblance whatsoever to the original. And even worse is if the original totally disappears. And this is what has happened with rasam – not within India, but outside. And with many, many other foods, many, even within India itself. 

When I first started my academic endeavors with Applied Linguistics and language teaching in Toronto in 1994, I encountered the concepts of the Melting Pot and the Mosaic that were used to differentiate the United States from Canada. The Mosaic, I was told, represented the Canadian context where ethnic groups maintained their distinctiveness while functioning as parts of a whole. The American Melting Pot, on the other hand, was a situation where people of diverse origins fused to make a new people. While there obviously could be a whole heck of a lot more said about this, that would be too much of a digression.

It seems to me that cuisines from around the world are increasingly becoming parts of a huge melting pot; contemporary food trends are moving in one direction – towards greater homogenization. While the process might have begun benignly, as a means of making different cuisines more familiar, less exotic to more people across the world, the result, more often than not, has been tremendously reductionist. A process of simplification as a means of imposing/resulting in the imposition of a known (read Western, Caucasian) structure and meaning to the seeming messiness of an unfamiliar cuisine. Remember the MasterChef UK episode that aired in 2018, where the Malaysian chef was eliminated because the chicken skin on her Malaysian chicken rendang wasn’t crisp? Chicken skin that is not crisp? Absolute anathema in the western world. Fortunately, the judges did get flack for it, a whole lot of it.

And so it was with Mulligatawny. The recipe began to evolve possibly as a means of making something more palatable to the British palate of the day. Today, rasam doesn’t really exist outside of India except in very regional Indian restaurants in large cities across the world. Certainly not the restaurants that serve Chicken Tikka Masala. Or Aloo Gobi. Or Tadka Dhal.  Why? Maybe because a rasam cannot be regarded as a curry? And maybe because anything that is not a curry doesn’t fit neatly into the melting pot?

So am I going to give you a rasam recipe today? Not yet. Because before I can teach you how to make a rasam, I want to teach you how to make a spice blend for a rasam, a rasam powder, one of the numerous spice blends, that are a part of the (South) Indian kitchen. This is a blend of a combination of roasted and ground dhal, coconut, chilies and various other spices, and will come in a few weeks.

But since the backbone of a rasam is dhal, today, I will focus on a dhal. And one as different as it can get from the typical tadka dhal commonly found in most Indian restaurants across the western world. Continuing with my current love affair with cabbage, today I give you a dhal with cabbage and coconut. Delicious, can be eaten with rice, or simply as a soup or stew. In Tamil, this dish is called a porichakootu  (/poɾɪccça kuːʈʈʊ/), which can be translated directly to seasoned stew (poricha can also mean fried, but fried stew would make less sense), seasoned through the tempering process. It is very easy to make, and absolutely delicious, eaten either with hot rice, or plain. Like a soup.

And here’s a little secret. Tadka (/t̪ʌɖka/) (sometimes spelled tarka,) in tadka dhal, means to temper – the process of roasting or frying spices in a little oil to release their flavors, done either at the beginning of a recipe, or towards the end. It’s a Hindi word. So the cabbage porichakottu we are making today, IS a tadka dhal, just not THE tadka dhal that the world outside India knows.

Cabbage Porichakoottu

Serves 4-6; vegan; gluten-free

Ingredients

1.     ½ cup toor dhal. Also spelled toovar dhal, these lentils are also called split pigeon pea lentils, and are one of the most commonly used lentils in India. They take some cooking, so you can, if you wish, substitute masoor dhal, or red/orange lentils for them. I prefer toor dhal because it tastes better. And that’s what I ate growing up. Now in India, we pressure cook the toor dhal; the method here has been modified to accommodate people without pressure cookers. If you have one, by all means use it. Every Indian household has at least one.

2.     2 cups of finely chopped cabbage. Chop the cabbage, don’t shred it. As with last week’s recipe, the way the veg is cut makes a difference to the mouthfeel of the end-product. 

3.     ½ tsp turmeric

4.     1½ tsp salt

5.     1 tsp sugar

6.     ½ cup fresh or unsweetened, desiccated coconut. If this is hard to come by, you can use ½ cup of coconut milk instead. It doesn’t taste quite the same, but will do great.

For the Tempering process 

1.     2 Tbsp coconut oil. If you don’t have any coconut oil, you can use a neutral oil like vegetable/canola/safflower/sunflower oil. 

2.     1 tsp mustard seeds – black or yellow

3.     1 Tbsp urad dhal (not the end of the world if you don’t have any, but if you can, do try and get some)

4.     1 tsp cumin seeds

5.     2 stalks of fresh curry leaves, if available

6.     3-4 dried red chilies, halved. No, this is not too many because the chilies are not cooked with the dhal, they are added to it just at the end, so don’t release all their heat. But of course, you can add fewer (or more!) if you like.

7.     2 squeezes (which amounts to about ¼ tsp, but 2 squeezes is so much more fun to say) of asafoetida 

Method

1.     Rinse and soak the toor dhal in 2 cups of boiling water. This helps reduce the cooking time. Allow it to soak for 30 minutes. (If you are using masoor dhal, you can completely skip this step.)

2.     Now add ½ tsp turmeric to the soaked dhal and boil it with its soaking liquid with a lid on. Boil on medium to low heat, stirring occasionally to prevent the water from boiling over.  If it gets too thick, add an additional half cup of water. It should take about 30 to 35 minutes to cook, at the end of which the dhal is well-boiled and mushy. For Indian dhals, the lentils should be completely boiled and not have a bite to them. (If you are using masoor dhal, cook the dhal for about 20 minutes with 1.5 cups of water.)

3.     In the meantime, boil the chopped cabbage with ¾ cup of water, 1 tsp of the salt, and 1 tsp sugar. Again, do this with a lid on, with the stove on between medium and low. It should take about 15 minutes for the cabbage to cook. If you like it less boiled, cook it for 10 minutes.

4.     Combine the boiled dhal and cabbage - at this stage, you shouldn’t need to add any water. Or take any away. Add the coconut and remaining ½ tsp salt, and cook together on a low flame for about 5 minutes.

5.     Now for the tempering. Heat the coconut oil in a small, and if possible, a heavy saucepan.

6.     When the oil’s hot, add the mustard seeds and turn the heat down to low. The mustard seeds will start popping. When they have popped for about 10 seconds, add the urad dhal. Stir constantly, allowing the dhal to turn a pretty golden brown. Make sure the heat is low so the mustard and urad dhal don’t burn. Now add the cumin seeds, curry leaves, red chilies, and two squeezes of asafoetida. Stand back as the curry leaves splutter and take a moment to take in the absolutely intoxicating aroma.

7.     Pour the tempering mixture into the dhal and cabbage mixture. Stir and serve. You can serve it with hot rice, or simply eat it as a soup.

*A huge shout out to my brilliant phonetician dad for giving me the transcriptions of the Tamil words in classical Tamil - I only speak colloquial Tamil, and another huge shout out to my incredible husband for figuring out how to use the International Phonetic Alphabet on Substack!