Home › Soup › Mock Turtle Soup
Mock Turtle Soup
Take a calf's head, pluck, and feet with skin on; put into a pot with about a pail of water; add two onions and skim well when boiling. Boil until the meat falls from the bone; then strain and turn the soup back in the pot; add a full tablespoonful of cloves, salt pepper, mace, nutmeg, and a little red pepper. Cut up half the meat and add to the soup, just heating it through. Then set it away; next day add more spice and a little butter, with flour rubbed in; one pint of port wine, lemon slices, eggs, and force meat balls. -Miss Chaffee. - FRENCH OX TAIL OR MOCK TURTLE SOUP.
Fry some ham, onions, butter, and ox tail together. Add to this as much hot water as you will need, and boil for one hour. Then add tomatoes, spices tied up in a bag, skin of one lemon. Boil well; mash a hardboiled egg and place in the bottom of your tureen before pouring in the soup. Just before serving add one wine glass of sherry and one lemon, sliced.-Mrs. John Durst.
Two versions sit under one heading here: a full calf's-head soup in the eighteenth-century English manner, and a much shorter oxtail version. Both assume a stockpot far larger than most home ranges will hold.
- A pail of waterA household pail was somewhere in the region of 8 to 12 quarts, so this needs a very large pot (16 quarts or more) and will yield soup for a crowd. Halving it, using a split head or head meat plus a couple of split trotters, is the practical route.
- Pluck and feet"Pluck" is the heart, liver and lungs. Lungs may not legally be sold for food in the United States, so the pluck as the recipe intends it is not obtainable; heart and liver are, from a halal or Latin butcher, and calf's or pig's feet supply the gelatin that gives the soup its turtle-like body. Order the head split, and scald and scrape the skin before it goes in the pot.
- The overnight restSetting a full pail of meat broth aside at room temperature overnight is the one step to change. Strain it, cool it fast in a shallow pan or an ice bath, refrigerate, and lift the fat off the next day. The flavour gain from the rest is real; the room-temperature part of it is not worth the risk.
- A tablespoonful of clovesRead this as whole cloves, and tie them with the mace and nutmeg in a bag as the oxtail version sensibly does. A tablespoon of ground clove in any quantity of soup will taste medicinal.
- Butter with flour rubbed inThis is beurre manié, equal parts soft butter and flour worked to a paste and whisked into the simmering soup in small lumps. Start with 2 tablespoons of each per gallon and give it several minutes to cook out the raw flour taste.
- Eggs and forcemeat ballsThe eggs are hard-boiled, quartered or sliced, added at the tureen. Forcemeat balls are pea-to-marble-sized dumplings of finely chopped veal or the reserved head meat bound with egg, breadcrumb and the same spices; poach them in the soup for about 10 minutes rather than raw in the bowl.
- Wine quantitiesA pint of port is proportionate to a pail of soup, not to a scaled-down batch; reckon on roughly 3 tablespoons per quart. A "wine glass" in cookbooks of this period is usually taken as about 2 fluid ounces, though the book does not say.
- Oxtail timingOne hour will not make oxtail tender. Allow 2½ to 3 hours at a bare simmer, or use a pressure cooker, then add the tomatoes, spice bag and lemon peel for the last half hour so they do not turn bitter.
Mock turtle soup was invented to stand in for green turtle soup, the luxury dish of Georgian and Victorian dining, and the substitution worked because a boiled calf's head yields the same gelatinous, faintly gluey richness as turtle fat and cartilage. English cookery writers were printing it by the later eighteenth century, and by the time this book appeared it had become a fixture of American church-supper and hotel menus alike, with tinned versions on grocers' shelves. The two contributors' names attached here are typical of the community-cookbook form: recipes collected from neighbours, printed as given, with no attempt to reconcile the fact that one calls for port and the other for sherry. The oxtail variant labelled "French" carries no obvious connection to any particular French original.