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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TURTLE SOUP, MOCK (another way)
Take half a calf's head with the skin on. Remove the brains, and lay them aside; wash the head in several waters, and let it soak in cold spring water for an hour. Put it into a stewpan, cover with cold water, let it boil gently for an hour, and carefully remove the scum as it rises. Cut the meat from the bones, and divide it with the tongue into small neat squares of about an inch. Let these cool, put them into a saucepan, cover with two quarts of stock, and let them boil gently until they are tender without being overdone. Melt four ounces of butter in a saucepan, and put in three ounces of lean, uncooked ham cut into dice, a sliced carrot, two table-spoonfuls of chopped parsley, a table-spoonful of mixed sweet herbs, of which two-fifths shall be sweet marjoram, two-fifths basil, and one-fifth thyme, two chopped onions, and one or two chopped mushrooms when they are to be had. Stir these over the fire for two or three minutes, then pour over them a pint of stock, and let them simmer gently for two hours. Moisten two table-spoonfuls of flour with a little cold stock, and add this to the seasoning stock. Let it boil; add the remainder of the stock, and rub the soup through a fine hair sieve. Put it back into the saucepan with the pieces of meat, boil all gently together for a few minutes, add a glassful of wine, a table-spoonful of lemon-juice, and salt and pepper if required. Have the forcemeat balls ready prepared, put them into the tureen, pour the soup over them, and serve very hot. Time, six or seven hours. Sufficient for twelve persons or more.
This is a full-scale Victorian mock turtle, built on a split calf's head, and it cannot be reproduced as written. The points below explain where the hazard lies and which parts of the method are simply obsolete.
- The brains are the problemThe first instruction is to remove the brains and lay them aside; the recipe never says what becomes of them, though in recipes of this type they are commonly worked into forcemeat or brain balls. Central nervous tissue from cattle is controlled as specified risk material because of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, with the strictest controls applying to older animals, and the prion is not destroyed by boiling, stewing or any domestic cooking.
- Use a current recipeIf you want mock turtle soup, work from a modern recipe built on braising beef, veal shin or oxtail. We are not offering a substitution scheme for this one.
- "Mixed sweet herbs" in this bookThe proportions given — two-fifths sweet marjoram, two-fifths basil, one-fifth thyme — are unusually precise for the period and worth noting as a record of what a late-Victorian kitchen meant by the phrase.
- The wine and the sieve"A glassful of wine" here means a wineglassful, reckoned in Victorian tables at roughly two fluid ounces; the recipe does not name the wine, though madeira or sherry was the usual choice for mock turtle. The hair sieve was a fine mesh of horsehair stretched on a wooden hoop, used where a modern kitchen would reach for a chinois or a blender and fine strainer.
- ScaleTwo quarts of stock for the meat plus a further pint for the seasoning base, feeding twelve or more, with a stated working time of six or seven hours. This is a soup written for a household with a cook and a kitchenmaid, not for a weeknight.
Mock turtle emerged in mid-eighteenth-century England as an imitation of green turtle soup, which was a luxury of the West India trade and expensive enough that a substitute became a genre of its own. A calf's head was the standard vehicle: boiled with the skin on, it yields gelatinous, faintly translucent squares of meat that were held to resemble the turtle's callipash and callipee, and the tongue and forcemeat balls filled out the bowl. By the time Cassell's Dictionary was compiled the mock version had long outlived any pretence of substitution — it was a dish in its own right, appearing in multiple variants in most large Victorian cookery books, and later in tinned form. The Mock Turtle in Lewis Carroll's Alice, weeping and part calf, is a joke that only works because every reader knew what the soup was made of.