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.
Home › Soups › Mock Turtle Or Calf's-Head Soup
Mock Turtle Or Calf's-Head Soup
Lay one large calf's head well cleaned and washed, and four pig's feet, in bottom of a large pot, and cover with a gallon of water; boil three hours, or until flesh will slip from bones; take out head, leaving the feet to be boiled steadily while the meat is cut from the head; select with care enough of the fatty portions in the top of the head and the cheeks to fill a tea-cup, and set aside to cool; remove brains to a saucer, and also set aside; chop the rest of the meat with the tongue very fine, season with salt, pepper, powdered marjoram and thyme, a teaspoon of cloves, one of mace, half as much allspice and a grated nutmeg. When the flesh falls from the bones of the feet, take out bones, leaving the gelatinous meat; boil all together slowly, without removing the cover, for two hours more; take the soup from the fire and set it away until the next day. An hour before dinner set the stock over the fire, and when it boils strain carefully and drop in the meat reserved, which should have been cut, when cold, into small squares. Have these all ready as well as the force-meat balls, to prepare which rub the yolks of five hard-boiled eggs to a paste in a wedgewood mortar, or in a bowl with the back of a silver spoon, adding gradually the brains to moisten them, also a little butter and salt. Mix with these, two eggs beaten very light, flour the hands and make this paste into balls about the size of a pigeon's egg: throw them into the soup five minutes before taking it from the fire; stir in a large tablespoon browned flour rubbed smooth in a little cold water, and finish the seasoning by the addition of a glass and a half of sherry or Maderia wine, and the juice of a lemon. It should not boil more than half an hour on the second day. Serve with sliced lemons.
A two-day soup from an era when a butcher would split a calf's head for you and nothing on the animal was wasted. The method is sound; the sourcing and the overnight cooling are what need attention.
- Sourcing the head and brainsA whole calf's head generally has to be ordered in from a halal, Latin American or old-style full-service butcher, usually split. Brain from young calves is not automatically prohibited — BSE specified-risk-material rules turn on the animal's age (in the EU and UK the skull and brain are SRM above 12 months; in the US above 30 months) — but brains are hard to buy in many places; if unavailable, the forcemeat balls can be bound with the hard yolks, butter and beaten egg alone.
- The overnight step is the hingeThe instruction to "set it away until the next day" was written for a cold larder. Cool the stock quickly — pot in a sink of ice water, or decanted into shallow pans — and refrigerate it. A covered gallon of gelatinous stock left at room temperature sits in the bacterial danger zone for hours. The chilling also lets the fat cap set so it can be lifted off cleanly, which is half the point of the rest.
- Skim before the second day's boilThe original never mentions skimming, because the overnight fat cap does the work. Lift it off in one disc before reheating, or the finished soup will be greasy under the sherry.
- A tea-cup of fat and cheek meatPeriod tea-cups are variously reckoned at a gill (4 fl oz) up to about 6 fl oz, so somewhere between half and three-quarters of a modern measuring cup of the gelatinous cheek and headmeat, reserved whole, chilled firm, then cut into neat dice. These are the "turtle" pieces and should stay identifiable in the bowl.
- A glass and a half of wineA nineteenth-century wine glass is about 2 fl oz, so roughly 1/3 cup of sherry or Madeira. Add it off the boil, with the lemon juice, so the aromatics are not driven off.
- SpicingA teaspoon each of cloves and mace plus a whole grated nutmeg is assertive by current standards, and correct for the dish — mock turtle was meant to taste of warm spice. If in doubt, add half, taste on the second day, and correct.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a skillet until nut-coloured, then slaked with cold water. It thickens far less than raw flour of the same weight; expect body and colour rather than a true thickening. Whisk the slurry in through a sieve to avoid lumps.
- Wedgwood mortarSimply an unglazed stoneware mortar, prized because it was harder than the food and did not stain. A modern mortar, or a bowl and fork, does the same job on hard yolks.
- Yield and timingA head, four trotters and a gallon of water give roughly 10 to 12 servings. Day one runs about five hours of simmering; day two needs an hour, of which no more than thirty minutes should be at a boil, or the diced meat and the forcemeat balls break up.
Mock turtle soup was contrived to counterfeit the great luxury dish of eighteenth-century England, green turtle soup, made from live sea turtles shipped from the West Indies at enormous expense. A calf's head, boiled long enough, yields a comparably gelatinous, faintly gluey mouthfeel and the same pale fatty morsels that turtle prized, and the heavy clove-mace-nutmeg spicing and the finishing glass of Madeira came over from the turtle recipes. By the later nineteenth century the imitation had long outlived any pretence and had simply become an American company-dinner soup — the sort of thing a household cooked over two days for a crowd. Its presence in a book of this kind also reflects a plain economic fact of the period: a calf's head and four pig's feet were among the cheapest things in the butcher's shop, and a cook who knew what to do with them could set an extravagant-looking table for very little.