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
This is a staple soup of English life, to be met with in most of the dining-rooms and hotels, not only in London, but almost everywhere in Great Britain. As its name implies, it is an imitation of the turtle soup introduced to us by our navigators over a century ago. The essential point in mock turtle must, therefore, be the "lumpy delight" furnished by calf's head; and the choice of the head should be a matter of some importance. It should be large, firm, and fat, full of brain, with good tongue and cheeks. As the preparation of this soup is a labour of love, and will occupy time, our recipe will run in the order of arrangement. First, clean and blanch a calf's head, with the skin on. Take out the brains, and put the head into eight or nine quarts of spring water. Bring it gently to a boil, skim frequently, and keep it simmering a couple of hours, by which time it should be sufficiently done to remove the bones easily. Second, return the bones to the pot, and add three pounds of fillet of veal, three pounds of leg of beef, cut into pieces an inch and a half square, three pounds of delicate pickled pork, also cut into small pieces, three or four slices of good sound old ham for flavouring, four large onions, sliced, three heads of celery, a large bunch of savory herbs, parsley, a few leaves of green basil, lemon thyme, marjoram, two bay-leaves, and stew gently, with good careful skimming, three full hours, adding stock to keep up the required quantity of soup. Third, while the stock is boiling, cut into nice sizable pieces the skin from the head and the fat that adheres to it, and cut the tongue into cubes of an inch square, the fleshy parts of the head into diamonds, dice, or any other shape. Make brain balls, or any other forcemeat, or egg balls. Fourth, when the stock has been sufficiently boiled, strain it from the bones, etc. (retaining only rich bits of meat), into a large clean stewpan; add the skin, tongue, etc., and a seasoning of cayenne and mace, Worcester sauce, mushroom ketchup, or any other seasoning that may be desirable. Thicken with four ounces of butter, kneaded in as much brown flour, and simmer gently for an hour, if the calf's head, etc., require it; but twenty minutes before serving, add half a pint of sherry, the brain or other balls, and button mushrooms (two or three ounces). Fifth, the best mode is to place the pieces of head, etc., at the bottom of the tureen, and strain the soup through a tamis-cloth; but if due care has been taken in the second stage of the preparation, and the skimming has been constant and careful, this need not be resorted to. Sixth, serve with lemon on a plate, as some persons like the soup a little acid. (For half a calf's head take half the ingredients.) This recipe is for four quarts. (See also CALF'S HEAD, MOCK TURTLL SOUP OF; and TURTLE SOUP, MOCK.)
The soup's defining garnish is brain balls made from the calf's head, and that is what rules this recipe out. The notes below explain the specific hazard and decode the terms, but no timings or substitutions are offered.
- The brains are the problemCentral nervous system tissue from cattle is the tissue in which BSE prions concentrate, and cooking does not destroy prions at any temperature a kitchen can reach. Since the BSE epidemic, brain and spinal cord from bovine animals have been classed as specified risk material and removed from the food chain in the UK, EU and elsewhere; the "brain balls" here cannot be made.
- The head itself, not just the brainsThe recipe calls for a whole calf's head with the skin on, boned in the kitchen. Bovine skull and vertebral tissue is subject to specified-risk-material controls in older animals, and whole heads are in any case hard to obtain now; head meat, cheek and tongue are generally sold as separated cuts, so boiling the head bones back into the stock is not easily reproducible.
- Scale is domestic-Victorian, not domestic-modernEight or nine quarts of water plus nine pounds of meat, reduced to four quarts of finished soup, assumes a stockpot and a range that most kitchens no longer have. If you want the flavour, use a current recipe for a beef and veal consommé or a modern mock turtle built on oxtail or shin.
- "Brown flour"Flour dried and toasted in the oven until nut-coloured, kept in a jar and used to darken sauces without the raw taste. Kneaded with butter it is a beurre manié rather than a cooked roux.
- Mushroom ketchup and Worcester sauceMushroom ketchup was a thin, black, salty mushroom extract, closer to a soy or fish sauce than to tomato ketchup; it is still made in Britain but no longer a pantry staple. "Worcester sauce" is a common British short form of Worcestershire sauce.
- Tamis-clothA tammy — a fine worsted or hair straining cloth stretched over a frame, twisted between two people to force soup through. A double thickness of muslin or a fine chinois occupies the same place in a modern kitchen.
- "Delicate pickled pork"Lightly brine-cured fresh pork, not smoked bacon or gammon. The nearest current equivalent is unsmoked green bacon or a piece of salt pork, and it would need soaking; the recipe adds no salt of its own, the pork and ham being the salted elements.
- YieldFour quarts, as the recipe states; half a calf's head takes half the ingredients.
Mock turtle came into being because real turtle was ruinously expensive: green turtles were shipped live to London from the West Indies from the mid-eighteenth century onward, kept alive in tanks at taverns, and turtle soup became the emblematic dish of civic banquets and Lord Mayor's dinners. The imitation, generally traced to the 1750s and 1760s, used a boiled calf's head because the gelatinous skin, cut into squares, mimicked the texture of turtle's "green fat" — the "lumpy delight" Cassell's insists on. The dish became so entrenched in English middle-class dining that Lewis Carroll could build a character out of it in 1865 and expect every reader to get the joke, and Cassell's here treats it as a fixture of hotel and dining-room menus rather than a novelty. Mock turtle outlived real turtle, surviving into the twentieth century as a canned soup; the calf's head version had already largely faded from domestic and restaurant practice well before the BSE controls of the 1980s and 1990s, which finished it off rather than caused its end.