Fresh chutneys should be served in saucers which should be tastefully arranged upon a tray. Four or five varieties can be presented together, so that there may be an opportunity of selection.

Caviare dressed with a few drops of lime juice and a dust of yellow pepper; roes of fish pounded with a little butter; potted prawns; potted ham; crab paste; lobster paste; and sardine paste, are hors d'oeuvres that can accompany the chutneys and materially assist them.

The best fresh chutneys are : tomato, cucumber, mint, brinjal, cocoanut, mango or apple, tamarind, and potato.

For tomato chutney

Remove the seeds and watery juice from two or three ripe tomatoes, chop them up with a quarter their bulk of white onion, and season the mince with a little salt; add a pinch of salt, two green chillies chopped small, and a little bit of celery also chopped, give the whole a dust of black pepper, and moisten it with a tea-spoonful of vinegar - anchovy vinegar for choice.

For cucumber chutney

Cut the cucumber into thin strips an inch long; say three heaped up table-spoonfuls; mix with them a tea-spoonful of finely-minced onion, one of chopped green chilli, and one of parsley; moisten with a dessert-spoonful of vinegar in which a pinch of sugar has been dissolved, a dessert-spoonful of salad oil, and dust over it salt and black pepper at discretion.

Brinjal chutney is made in this manner:- Boil two or three brinjals, let them get cold, scrape out the whole of the inside of the pods, pass this through the sieve to get rid of the seeds. Rub a soup-plate with a clove of garlic, empty the brinjal pulp therein, dress it with a tea-spoonful of minced onion, one of green chilli, one of vinegar, and a very little green ginger, season with salt and black pepper, pat the mixture into a little mould, and serve in a saucer.

Cocoanut chutney consists of pounded cocoanut, flavoured with minced onion and green chilli, green ginger, and an atom of garlic, moistened with tamarind juice, and seasoned with red pepper and salt.

Mint chutney is made in the same way, substituting pounded mint for cocoanut. Scald the mint leaves before pounding them.

Mango or apple chutney is made like cucumber chutney with the addition of a tea-spoonful of chopped green ginger.

Tamarind chutney is a good one:- Pound together a table-spoonful of tamarind pulp and one of green ginger, son it with salt, a tea-spoonful of minced green chillies, and one of mustard seed roasted in butter; mix thoroughly and serve.

Mashed potato chutney is flavoured with minced onion, green chilli, salt, pepper, vinegar, and a pinch of sugar. With these relishes, curries are undoubtedly far nicer than when sent up unassisted.

Treacher's tinned Bombay ducks when presented with curries only require crisping in a brisk oven.

Papodums may either be toasted on a griddle over some clear embers, or fried in hot fat. Thin slices of raw brinjal, and green plantains, similarly fried, like potato chips, are nice with curries.

Mulligatunny.

If it be admitted that the knack of curry-making has gradually passed away from the native cook, I think it must also be allowed that a really well-made mulligatunny is, comparatively speaking, a thing of the past. Perhaps, then, a few words regarding this really excellent, and at times, most invigorating soup may be acceptable. In attempting this, I am anxious to address my observations to vegetarians, as well as to those who have no objection to eat meat, for I hope to be able to show that a very excellent mulligatunny can be made without any assistance from flesh or fowl.

This preparation, originally peculiar to Southern India, derives its name from two Tamil words - molegoo (pepper), and tunnee (water). In its simple form, as partaken of by the poorer natives of Madras, it is, as its name indicates, a "pepper-water" or soupe maigre, which Mootoo-samy makes as follows :- He pounds together a dessertspoonful of tamarind, six red chillies, six cloves of garlic, a tea-spoonful of mustard seed, a salt-spoonful of fenugreek seed, twelve black peppercorns, a tea-spoonful of salt, and six leaves of haray-pauk. When worked to a paste, he adds a pint of water, and boils the mixture for a quarter of an hour. While this is going on, he cuts up two small onions, puts them into a chatty, and fries them in a dessert-spoonful of ghee till they begin to turn brown, when he strains the pepper-water into the chatty, and cooks the mixture for five minutes, after which it is ready. The pepper-water is, of course, eaten with a large quantity of boiled rice, and is a meal in itself. The English, taking their ideas from this simple composition, added other condiments, with chicken, mutton, etc., thickened the liquid with flour and butter, and by degrees succeeded in concocting a soupe grasse of a decidedly acceptable kind.

Oddly enough, we undoubtedly get the best mulliga-tunny now-a-days in England, where it is presented in the form of a clear, as well as in that of a thick, soup. In an artistic point of view, the former is infinitely the better of the two, as I shall endeavour to explain later on. Nevertheless, the thick is by no means to be despised. The superiority of the English adaptation needs but little explanation, for it may safely be attributed to the fact that the soup is composed upon a really strong foundation in the shape of stock, an important point that most Indian cooks slur over.

This reminds me of an anecdote, which an old friend and fellow-enthusiast on the subject of cookery, communicated to me as follows :- He was at home on furlough, and happened to visit an old uncle, whose early years had been spent in the Navy. The Admiral (for the old gentleman had attained that rank) was of a somewhat dictatorial nature, and had acquired a habit of asserting his opinions with a closed fist and vehement superlatives. Conversa-tion one day turned upon mulligatunny, and the ancient mariner declared vociferously that he had never tasted the soup properly made since serving in the West Indies in the Penelope frigate in the year 1823, angrily shutting up his nephew for daring to observe that it could be fairly well prepared in the East. Now, my friend was far too wise in his generation to contradict his uncle, "but," said he, "I determined to circumvent him." Accordingly when, after some little time, the Admiral went up to London, he was lured into an ambuscade at his nephew's house. "I made the mulligatunny myself," said my friend, "the basis of which was a good veal stock, prepared, of course, the previous day. My method of procedure was as follows :- I cut up a large sweet onion into fine rings, and fried them in two ounces of good butter, till about to turn yellow. I then stirred in three table-spoonfuls of Barrie's Madras mulligatunny paste, adding sufficient stock to bring the mixture to the consistency of mayonnaise sauce. This I tasted, and, finding that it required a little sub-acid, I administered a table-spoonful of red currant jelly and a few drops of lemon juice. Having stirred this in well, I put in a dessert-spoonful of Madras chutney, and added stock enough to produce a thin soup - about three pints in all. This I allowed to simmer (to extract the flavours of the various ingredients) for a quarter of an hour, while I pounded four ounces of sweet almonds in a mortar with a little milk, using a breakfast-cupful altogether. When fully pounded, I strained the almond milk into the soup, and stopped the simmering. The next step was to pass the whole of the liquid through a tin strainer into a clean bowl to catch up lumps of onion, chutney, etc. The mulligatunny having been skimmed, was now ready, all but the thickening. This process was carried out in due course, with two ounces of butter and two of flour. The soup was brought to boiling-point, and, off the fire, just before serving, a coffee-cupful of the best cream I could get was stirred into the tureen as the soup was poured into it." "When this was presented to the Admiral, the old gentleman was delighted, and, altogether forgetting his previous asseveration, exclaimed that he had not eaten such a basin of mulligatunny since serving on the East India station in the Cockatrice in the year 1834. "I knew," concluded by friend, "that the dear old man was thinking of 'calipash' and 'calipee' when he pitched into me on the previous occasion, but I was not such an ass as to suggest that he had made a mistake."