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Veal Imitation of Mock Turtle
Put three or four pounds of knuckle of veal into an earthenware pan with two calf's feet, two onions, each one stuck with two cloves, a bunch of sweet herbs, a blade a mace, half a dozen allspice, and half a tea-spoonful of peppercorns. Cover the ingredients with cold water, tie several folds of paper over the jar, put it in a well-heated oven, and let it remain until the meat is quite tender. Take it up, and let it get cold. Remove the cake of fat from the top of the jelly, and cut the meat into pieces convenient for serving, free from bone or skin. Put these into a stewpan with the jellied stock, a large spoonful of ketchup, and whatever seasoning is required. Let the preparation become quite hot, then add a dessert-spoonful of lemon-juice, and serve with forcemeat balls and hard-boiled eggs. If more convenient, cow-heels may be used instead of calf's feet. Time to bake the meat, three to four hours. Probable cost, 4s. Sufficient for eight or nine persons.
A Victorian mock turtle built on gelatinous veal stock rather than the usual calf's head. The method is straightforward — a long covered bake, an overnight set, then a gentle reheat — but several of the terms need translating.
- The hinge: cool it fully before finishingThe point of letting it get cold is not flavour but separation — the fat sets as a solid cake you can lift off in one piece, leaving clear jellied stock. Skip it and you get a greasy soup. Chill in the refrigerator rather than leaving the pot standing out.
- "A well-heated oven"With the pot sealed under paper and the contents covered in cold water, this behaves as a long covered bake rather than a roast. The term is imprecise and gives no exact figure; something around 300–325F suits the three to four hours specified, and the meat should pull from the bone.
- Ketchup does not mean tomatoIn an English book of this date "ketchup" means mushroom or walnut ketchup — a thin, dark, salty, spiced condiment closer to a mushroom soy than to anything sweet. Tomato ketchup will make the dish sugary and pink. Mushroom ketchup is still sold; a spoonful of soy plus a dash of Worcestershire is the nearest common substitute.
- Calf's feet and cow-heelsBoth are rich in collagen, and they are what makes the stock set to a jelly. Order them from a butcher, or substitute two to three pounds of split veal knuckle bones or pig's trotters. Without a gelatinous cut the dish will not behave as described.
- Blade of maceA blade is one piece of the dried lacy aril from around a nutmeg — roughly a quarter to a half teaspoon of ground mace if you cannot get it whole. With the cloves and allspice it carries the aromatic side of the dish.
- The earthenware jarAny lidded casserole or Dutch oven does the job. The several folds of paper tied over the top were a seal against evaporation in a leaky earthenware pot; a tight lid, or a sheet of foil under the lid, achieves the same.
- Seasoning at the endThe stock is unsalted through the long bake, which is correct — salt it when you reheat, after the jelly has concentrated. The dessertspoon (about two teaspoons) of lemon juice goes in off the boil, at the last moment, to keep it sharp.
- Forcemeat balls and eggsTraditionally small balls of veal or bread forcemeat, poached or fried and dropped in at serving, with quartered hard-boiled eggs. These are not decoration; with the eggs they are what makes the bowl read as mock turtle.
- Yield and costEight or nine servings as written. The "probable cost, 4s" is a period price for the whole dish and has no modern equivalent — it appears throughout Cassell's as a guide for household budgeting.
Mock turtle soup was invented to imitate real green turtle, an expensive eighteenth- and nineteenth-century luxury whose appeal lay in its gelatinous texture and the mix of firm and soft pieces in the bowl. The standard imitation used a boiled calf's head, whose skin and gelatin mimicked turtle fat and calipash closely enough to fool a diner who had never had the original; Cassell's version here sidesteps the head and reaches the same texture through knuckle and calf's feet. The forcemeat balls and hard-boiled eggs are inherited directly from turtle soup service, where the egg stood in for turtle eggs. Note that this appears in the book as a made dish rather than a soup: the set jelly is reheated to a rich sauce around pieces of meat, closer to a ragout.