Muligutwanny or Mulligatawny or Mulliguthwanny – there are lot of confusion available for this The Then India originated International soup. Origin of the word soup comes from the old French language where the “soupe” was a slice of bread, other says it comes from the Sanskrit word “Su – Pa” means well fed. This is taken from the very first French cookery book “Metare” given by Philips VI and Charles V. in 1932 a famous Chef GuillareTirel who wrote a book “Chef de Cuisine”. A restaurant in Paris still has this name.
According to the classification of soups – International soups are soups which are nationally made and internationally popularised.
Few of the examples include:
- Gazpacho – Spain
- Minestrone – Italy
- Madras Soup – India
- Shark Fin Soup – China
But when we talk about this particular soup “Muligutwanny” – it is considered to be originated in undivided India. It has extreme Tamil flavours which always created a confusion with Sri Lanka and India. It is yet not decided that which country holds the pride for this soup – rather it is best to understand that this is a Tamil soup. The East India Company officials were extremely fond of this soup which was hearty at that time and a different aroma built in the soup when they tasted it in Sri Lanka which is also a Tamil dominated country. The word Muligutwanny refers to two different word ‘Mullaga/Milagu’ means peppery and ‘Twanny’ refers to water. Hence the soup means a pepper flavoured water.
It became popular with the British stationed in India (employees of the East India Company) during colonial times, during the late 18th century and later. When they returned home, they brought the recipe back with them to England, and to other members of the Commonwealth, especially Australia.
Recipes for the soup appeared in many Victorian publications. The Nabob’s cook book from 1870 has a recipe featuring ‘fowl’. It also contains a recipe for a ‘non-soup’ version.
Cassell’s Household Guide from 1869 contains a bit more history, particularly in preparing the dish, and you can’t help but admire the line ‘kill, singe and empty a chicken’ in the recipe method.
Even French cookery adapted for English families by Frances Crawford, published in 1853, contains a recipe, though she adds at the end…
It is believed that the Mulligatawny was concocted by Indian cooks to serve the British need to havea soup before meal. Given that there was no concept of a soup in traditional South Indian cuisine, ingenious cooks are said to have adapted one dish – closest to a soup – the rasam.
While we don’t know exactly when or where this soup was invented, the earliest known reference to it is an English (military) song from 1784 CE. Composed by an anonymous British soldier during the second Anglo-Mysore war fought against Tipu Sultan, the first reference to the Muligutwanny wasn’t very complimentary. As the soldier laments about his bad rations and uncertain fate he says –
“In vain our hard fate we repine,
In vain on our fortune we rail,
On Mullaghee-tawny we dine
Or Congee in Bangalore jail.”
This verse iterates that the Mulligatawny was commonly served in the British army barracks in the late 18th century CE. Interestingly, though it seems that it wasn’t delicacy, the Muligutwanny seems to have been popular enough to travel far, to England and the distant corners of the British empire.
As the empire expanded, Indian food was gaining popularity in Britain. In 1809, an Indian immigrant to Britain, Dean Mohammad had opened the first Indian restaurant, ‘The Hindustan Coffee-House’ in London. Aimed at ‘the Nobility and Gentry’, the Coffee House served Indian dishes adapted to English tastes. This included the Muligutwanny soup.
In the book ‘The Cooks Oracle’ first published in 1817 and compiled by Dr. William Kitchner, an English gourmand there is a special reference to this soup. The book mentions the growing popularity of this ‘newly invented’ soup in England but claims it
‘many not yet charm enough to seduce a restaurant goer. It is a fashionable soup and great favourite to our East Indian friends’.
Dr.Modhumita Roy from Tufts University, in her award winning research paper “Some like it hot: Gender, Class and Empire in making of the Muligutwanny Soup” writes that so popular was this soup with British civil servants from Madras Presidency that ‘Mull – short for Muligutwanny – was applied as a distinctive sobriquet to members of the service’. Roy points out that it was only later, with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the arrival of the British memsahibs, that the curries prepared by Indian cooks began to be looked down upon. The Muligutwanny soup fell from favour only to replaced by the regular English roasts or pies.
Ironically, while the soup was no longer popular on the tables of the British Raj, it became a popular household dish in Britain. By the 1850’s, tins of Muligutwanny soup began to appear in shops and you could even buy a soup mix for just 4dimes. Such was its demand, that the American company Heinz began selling tins in Britain and even in the United States. Contemporary cookbooks began giving their own recipes for the soup, often adding exotic ingredients such as rabbit, pheasant and wildfowl.
The Britons loved this soup so much that they carried tin cans of it with them to remote corners of the world. The noted British explorer Dr. David Livingstone, for instance, took tins of Muligutwanny with him on expedition into the deep interiors of Africa. He writes in his travelogue –
“After the gruelling 40-day trek (in Africa), on 6th October 1859, I arrived back to the ship. We made soup from the Muligutwanny paste which we carried in pouches.”
Amazingly the popularity of the Muligutwanny soup that was so intrinsically linked with the British Empire, also ended with the Empire. Once considered exotic by the Britons, it became simply ‘old fashioned’. The younger generation of Britons had moved on. Salman Rushdie, in his book Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991dismisses Muligutwanny soup as something that.
‘tries to taste Indian, but ends up being ultra-parochially British, only with too much pepper’.