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Turtle Soup, Mock, Curry Balls For
Rub a piece of butter the size of a walnut into a handful of finely-grated bread-crumbs, and add the yolk of an egg boiled hard. Pound the mixture in a mortar to a smooth paste, season with curry-powder, and make it up into small balls the size of a nutmeg. Throw these into boiling water till firm, drain and serve them in the soup. Time to boil, two minutes. Probable cost, 3d. for this quantity. At least one ball should be served to each guest.
A garnish rather than a dish: small curried crumb balls dropped into mock turtle soup at the last moment. The whole thing takes ten minutes, but the paste has to be worked properly or the balls fall apart in the pot.
- The hinge: pound it to a real pasteHard-boiled yolk and butter are the only binders here, so the mixture must be worked until it is smooth and slightly tacky, with no crumb left dry. A mortar or a small food processor both work; if the paste still crumbles when squeezed, add a little more softened butter, not water.
- Walnut of butter, handful of crumbsA walnut-sized piece of butter is roughly 1 oz (2 tablespoons). A "handful" of finely grated crumbs is perhaps an ounce or so by weight -- around a quarter-cup of dry crumbs. Use dry, finely grated crumbs rather than fresh soft ones, which hold too much moisture.
- Size of a nutmegA whole nutmeg is about three-quarters of an inch across, so these are marble-sized, not meatball-sized. From this quantity expect eight to twelve balls, which matches the note that each guest gets at least one.
- Boiling water is too violentDrop them into water at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil, which knocks crumb balls apart. Two minutes is right for firming them; longer only makes them heavy.
- Curry-powder of the periodVictorian curry powders were typically built on turmeric, coriander and fenugreek, and were often milder than modern blends, though recipes varied and some carried plenty of cayenne. Start with a scant teaspoon in this quantity and taste the raw paste; a hot contemporary blend will overwhelm the soup it is meant to accent.
- ServingAdd them to the hot soup in the tureen or in the plates at the moment of serving. They will soften and eventually disintegrate if left to stand in the liquid.
- Probable costThreepence for the batch makes this a very cheap garnish: it dresses up a soup for company at almost no expense.
Mock turtle soup was the standing English substitute for the genuine article, which required a live green turtle and was ruinously expensive; the imitation was built on a boiled calf's head, whose gelatinous skin gives a mouthfeel close to turtle fat. The garnishes did much of the work of the illusion -- forcemeat balls and yellow egg balls are usually explained as suggesting the pieces of green fat and the unlaid eggs found in a real turtle -- and by the later nineteenth century a curried version like this one had joined them, reflecting how thoroughly curry powder had settled into the English store cupboard. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery catalogued such components separately, on the assumption that a cook would assemble a soup from several entries rather than one; that is why this reads as a fragment.