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TURTLE SOUP, MOCK (easy way of making a small quantity)
Take some stock made from bones or the liquor in which meat has been boiled. Boil it with fresh vegetables, herbs, and spices till it is pleasantly flavoured, and strain carefully. Procure a tin of mock turtle soup. Boil this up with a little more than an equal quantity of the flavoured stock. When it is quite hot throw a claret-glassful of Madeira or good sherry into it, and serve very hot with one or two cut lemons on a dish. The mixture of the stock made from fresh vegetables with the preserved soup will correct the slight taste of the tin, which is the only objection which can be urged against it, and when a small quantity only of soup is required it will save time, trouble, and expense to make it in this way, rather than to prepare it at home. When there is no stock in the house, the vegetables and seasoning may be boiled in water, but, of course, the soup will not be so good as if stock were used. Time, one hour to flavour the stock. Probable cost, a tin of mock turtle, 1s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
This is an assembly job rather than a recipe: a tin of soup stretched and de-tinned with a fresh aromatic stock. The whole point is the ratio and the finishing wine.
- Claret-glassfulA claret glass held roughly 4 fl oz (120 ml) in the period, though the term was never exact. For five or six servings that is a generous but not unreasonable slug of Madeira or sherry.
- Add the wine off the boilThrow it in when the soup is hot and serve at once. Prolonged boiling after the wine goes in drives off the aromatics and leaves a flat, faintly sour note, which is the opposite of what the Madeira is there for.
- Tinned mock turtleCommercially canned mock turtle soup has all but vanished from general sale in Britain and the United States; it survives mainly as a regional speciality in parts of Germany and around Cincinnati. Any good tinned or chilled beef or oxtail soup will behave the same way in this method.
- The stock is the workAn hour of simmering vegetables, herbs and spices is the only real cooking here. Onion, carrot, celery, bay, thyme, parsley stalks, a few peppercorns and a blade of mace approximate the Victorian idea of "pleasantly flavoured"; strain it through a fine sieve or cloth.
- Proportions"A little more than an equal quantity" means slightly more stock than soup, so a standard 400 g tin wants roughly 450-500 ml of stock. Tinned soups are often saltier than this method assumes, so taste and season only after the two are combined.
- The tinny tasteCassell's blames the can, and modern lacquered cans are far less likely to impart that metallic edge. What dilution with fresh stock still corrects is the flat, over-reduced quality of concentrated tinned soup.
- The lemonsCut lemons handed round at table are not decoration. Mock turtle is rich and gelatinous, and a squeeze of juice at the plate is how the acidity was adjusted individually.
- YieldFive or six small soup-course servings in the Victorian sense; treat it as four modern bowls if the soup is the main event.
Real turtle soup, made from imported green turtle, was one of the great luxury dishes of Georgian and Victorian dining, and mock turtle was the domestic answer to it: a calf's head, boiled long enough that the skin turned to something with the same slippery gelatinous body as turtle, seasoned heavily with herbs, spices and wine. By the time Cassell's was compiled, the labour of that dish had been industrialised, and a shilling tin could stand in for the head, the boiling and the day's work. What this entry really records is a shift in how households thought about convenience food: the tin is accepted without embarrassment, but it is expected to need correcting, and the fresh stock, the herbs and the glass of Madeira are the cook's contribution to something otherwise bought ready-made. The Madeira and the cut lemons are often traced back to the eighteenth-century turtle table, where both are said to have been closely associated with the dish.