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Turtle Soup, Mock, Egg Balls For
Boil four eggs till they are hard. Put them into cold water, and when they are cold pound the yolks in a mortar with a tea-spoonful of flour, a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley, half a tea-spoonful of salt, and a pinch of cayenne. Moisten the mixture with the yolk of a raw egg. Form it into balls the size of a small nutmeg, throw these into boiling water, let them boil for two minutes, drain them on a sieve, and serve in the soup. Probable cost, 6d. for this quantity. Sufficient, one egg ball should be served to each guest.
A garnish rather than a dish: small poached dumplings of hard-boiled yolk, dropped into mock turtle soup at the table. The whole thing takes ten minutes once the eggs are cooked.
- The hinge is the raw yolkAdd it gradually and stop when the paste just holds together in a ball. Too much liquid and the balls slump and dissolve the moment they meet water; the cooked yolks and flour give very little structure on their own.
- SizeA small nutmeg is roughly three-quarters of an inch across. The recipe's own instruction is one ball per guest, so make them to that size and expect the quantity to stretch further than a small table needs.
- "Boiling water" wants to be simmeringA hard rolling boil knocks the balls apart. Bring the water to the boil, drop the heat so it barely trembles, then slide them in for the two minutes stated. They are already cooked through; the poaching only sets the raw yolk binding them.
- CayenneA pinch is meant to be perceptible against the flat richness of the soup. Victorian cayenne was a frequent target of adulteration scandals, so its strength was not reliable; add cautiously and taste the raw paste before shaping.
- Shocking the eggsThe cold-water step is not just for handling. It stops the yolks developing the grey-green sulphur ring, which would show badly in a pale garnish.
- Serve at the last momentDrain the balls and drop them into the tureen or the individual plates as the soup goes out. Left sitting in hot liquid they soften and cloud it.
- CostSixpence is a late-Victorian figure and tells you only that this was a cheap flourish. Cassell's quoted prices as a guide for household accounting, not as a measure you can convert usefully.
Mock turtle soup was built on a calf's head, boiled down until the gelatinous skin gave the same lippy, glutinous texture as the real green turtle that West India merchants shipped live to London kitchens through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Genuine turtle soup came garnished with the turtle's own eggs, small and yolky and shell-less, and the imitation is often said to have had to answer for them: these pounded yolk balls are traditionally explained as the stand-in, just as the calf's head stands in for the turtle. By the time Cassell's was compiled, mock turtle had long since stopped being a substitute anyone apologised for and had become a dish in its own right, a fixture of civic dinners and of the middle-class table that would never have seen a live turtle. The garnish survives in the entry with the note that one ball goes to each guest, no more — the kind of sufficiency note Cassell's applies routinely to garnishes.