Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Mock Turtle Soup
1/2 calf's head, 2 pounds shin beef, small knuckle veal, 3 tablespoons Crisco, 1/2 cup flour, 1 ounce ham, large bunch herbs, 12 whole peppers, 6 cloves, blade mace, 3 onions, 1 carrot, 1/2 head celery, 1 leek, glass sherry or some lemon juice, salt and red pepper to taste, and quenelles. Leave head in water to soak for 5 or 6 hours; then wash well and take out brains. Bone head. Cut 6 ounces lean part of veal and reserve to make quenelles. Then chop bones taken from head, the veal, and beef. Put them into stockpot, and place flesh from head on top; then well cover with water, add little salt and let slowly come to boil. Skim well; add vegetables, cleaned but not cut up, and spices. Let all simmer very slowly for 8 or 9 hours. When head is quite tender (it will take about four hours), lift it out carefully and place between 2 dishes to press until quite cold. Strain stock. Melt Crisco in pan, add ham cut into small pieces, and fry slowly for five minutes, then add flour and stir until it is of dark brown color. Take off stove and add stock by degrees; stir over fire until it boils; put it at corner of stove to simmer for 20 minutes; skim and strain it. Cut head into small square pieces and warm up in soup; add sherry, red pepper, and salt to taste. Turn it out into tureen, then put in some very small quenelles, made with teaspoons, and poached for 10 minutes in water.
This is a full-day stockpot project built on a split calf's head, and it cannot be reproduced today. The notes below explain what the ingredients and terms meant and why the dish is off the table.
- The hinge is the head itselfThe recipe is built on half a calf's head, boned, simmered, pressed cold and cubed. That cut carries skull, cranial nerve and eye tissue, which are the tissues associated with BSE transmission. Long simmering does nothing about it.
- Prions are not destroyed by cookingUnlike bacteria, the misfolded proteins responsible for BSE and variant CJD survive normal cooking temperatures, and eight or nine hours at a slow simmer is irrelevant to them. There is no time or temperature that makes this safe.
- Removing the brains is not a safeguardThe instruction to "take out brains" most likely reflects the common practice of cooking brains separately rather than any precaution. In any case the risk tissue is not limited to the brain, and in many jurisdictions the skull, brain, eyes and spinal cord of older cattle are classed as specified risk material and cannot be sold for food.
- Calf's head is largely unobtainableCalf's head is hard to obtain -- where veal heads are still butchered they are generally sold split and cleaned, and inspection rules in many countries restrict what may be left in. A modern cook looking for the same rich, gelatinous body should use a current recipe for a veal or beef soup rather than adapting this one.
- Crisco, and why it is hereCrisco was launched in 1911 and shows up in books of this period wherever an older text would have said lard or butter. It is doing nothing here but making a brown roux with the flour.
- Blade mace and "large bunch herbs"Blade mace is the whole dried aril of the nutmeg, sold in brittle orange-brown blades and milder in effect than ground mace. The herb bundle is an unmeasured bouquet garni, typically parsley stalks, thyme and bay.
- Quenelles and a "glass" of sherryQuenelles are poached forcemeat dumplings, here made from the six ounces of lean veal set aside and shaped between two teaspoons. A glass of sherry in books of this date means roughly a wine glass, about two fluid ounces.
Mock turtle soup was an imitation of green turtle soup, the eighteenth-century luxury made from live sea turtles shipped from the Caribbean at great cost. A boiled calf's head, with its mix of lean meat, fat and gelatinous skin, was found to give something close to the gluey richness of turtle meat, and by the early nineteenth century mock turtle had become a standard of English and American cookery in its own right, with the browned roux, mace, cloves, herbs and sherry that this version keeps. It was familiar enough by 1865 for Lewis Carroll to give Alice a weeping Mock Turtle, whose calf's head and hooves come from Tenniel's illustration rather than Carroll's text. A split head was cheap butcher's meat, and the labour to deal with it was assumed to be available.