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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Calf's Head, Mock Turtle Soup Of
Take half a calf's head with the skin on, remove the brains, wash it in two or three waters, and boil it gently for an hour and a half. Take off the skin, cut it and the flesh into pieces about an inch and a half square, and throw them into cold water. Drain, and put them into a saucepan, cover with stock, and let them simmer gently for another hour and a half. Put three quarts of nicely-flavoured stock into a separate stewpan, and with it a tea-spoonful of minced thyme, a tea-spoonful of marjoram, four bay-leaves, three dessert-spoonfuls of chopped parsley, half an ounce of whole pepper, half an ounce of salt, three onions with four cloves stuck in them, half a head of celery, and two table-spoonfuls of mushroom ketchup. Let these simmer slowly for two hours. Strain the liquor, thicken it with two table-spoonfuls of flour, mixed with a little cold water, and added gradually, then pour it into the same saucepan as the meat, add half a pint of sherry, eight or nine forcemeat balls (one for each person), the hard-boiled yolks of five eggs, and the juice of a lemon. Let all simmer for a few minutes, and serve. The forcemeat balls should be made by mixing well together the brains, a breakfast-cupful of finely-grated bread-crumbs, a little salt, pepper, nutmeg, and parsley, three ounces of butter, and two eggs. Form them into balls about the size of a nutmeg, fry them in boiling oil or dripping, and drain them from the fat before they are added to the soup. Time, four hours. Probable cost, 1s.6d. per quart, without the wine. Sufficient for ten or twelve persons. (See also TURTLE SOUP, MOCK.)
This is a genuine nineteenth-century mock turtle soup, and the forcemeat balls that define it are made from calf's brains. That single element puts the recipe beyond use today, and no adjustment of time or temperature changes the risk.
- The brains are the problemBovine central nervous tissue — brain and spinal cord — is the specified risk material for bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The infectious agent is a misfolded protein, not a microbe, and it is not destroyed by simmering, frying, or any ordinary domestic cooking. Frying the forcemeat balls does nothing to it.
- Why the tissue cannot simply be swapped outThe brains are not a garnish here; they are a principal ingredient of the forcemeat balls, alongside the bread-crumbs, butter and eggs. Removing them leaves a different preparation, and this page is not the place to design one.
- Half a head, skin onThe cut the recipe assumes — an unsplit, unskinned half calf's head — is hard to buy in many countries now, partly because bovine skull and nervous tissue are restricted in some jurisdictions. Availability may well stop a cook before safety does.
- If you want mock turtle soupUse a current recipe from a modern source. There are versions built on veal shank, oxtail or beef cheek that reach the same gelatinous, sherry-and-herb character without nervous tissue.
- Reading the originalFor historical interest: three quarts is about 3.4 litres, half a pint of sherry is about 285 ml, half an ounce of whole pepper is roughly 14 g of peppercorns, and mushroom ketchup is a thin, dark, salty mushroom extract rather than anything tomato-based. "Probable cost, 1s.6d. per quart" reflects a period when calf's head was a relatively cheap butcher's purchase.
- ScaleThe book calls it sufficient for ten or twelve persons, while specifying only eight or nine forcemeat balls, "one for each person" — the two figures do not quite agree.
Mock turtle soup was invented to imitate real turtle soup, which by the eighteenth century was a luxury of London civic banquets, made from green turtles shipped live from the West Indies. The imitation leaned on calf's head because the gelatinous skin, simmered long, gives the same faintly sticky richness and irregular translucent pieces as turtle fat, and the sherry, herbs, cloves and lemon were said to approximate the seasoning. The pairing became so fixed that calf's head was widely taken as a byword for mock turtle, which is why Cassell's files the recipe under both headings. Lewis Carroll's Mock Turtle, drawn by Tenniel with a calf's head and hooves on a turtle's body, is the joke's most durable trace. Brains served in the forcemeat balls were a matter of thrift and texture; the connection between bovine nervous tissue and human disease was not established until the BSE outbreak of the 1980s and 1990s, long after this book went to press.