Mulligatawny Soup

Mulligatawny comes from the Tamil word milagn-tannir, which means ‘pepper-water’. A highly and subtly spiced soup from East India, it was so popular with the East India Company merchants that they tried to get it made at home in England. The results were often a greasy soup flavoured only with stale curry powder, but the following recipe for a thick mulligatawny, which comes from a nineteenth-century Edinburgh manuscript is very good, though probably less spiced than it would be in I