Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them.

Wodehouse’s simile turns nostalgia into something unappetizing: mulligatawny in a cheap restaurant suggests a murky, overmixed concoction whose contents are best left undiscovered. The line implies that memory—especially of past troubles, embarrassments, or lost happiness—can become unpleasant or destabilizing when “stirred,” i.e., revisited and analyzed. It also carries Wodehouse’s characteristic comic deflation: lofty sentiment about remembrance is punctured by a homely culinary image. Beneath the humor is a practical counsel: some parts of the past are better left undisturbed, because rummaging through them can bring up unwanted fragments and sour the present.