Mulligatawny

The wind changed last week. Not dramatically, but enough that you noticed. The mornings are darker. The garden has given up on summer and started thinking about root vegetables. That's when this soup starts making sense.

Mulligatawny came from India to Britain by way of homesick officers and their cooks, and somewhere in the crossing it became something else entirely. The Tamil original, milagu tannir, means pepper water. What arrived in English kitchens kept the warmth but added lentils, apple, cream, whatever the larder suggested. Two hundred years of adaptation, and now it belongs here as much as it ever belonged anywhere. I won't pretend this is an Indian recipe. It isn't. It's a British one, with Indian memory running through it like a thread.

I make it when the first proper cold arrives, usually October, sometimes late September if the year turns early. The spices fill the kitchen with the kind of warmth that central heating can't replicate. The lentils dissolve into the broth and thicken it. The apple, a good sharp Bramley, gives it a sweet-sour quality that stops the whole thing feeling heavy. Chicken thighs cooked on the bone and then shredded back through. It's a generous bowl. The kind you eat slowly, both hands round the warm stoneware, while the evening settles in around you.

I wrote it down in the notebook years ago: "Mulligatawny. Tuesday. October rain. Fed four. Silence at the table, which is the best review a soup can get."