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Mock Turtle Soup
Put three cups of black beans into three quarts of cold water Sim- Reheat with a soup bone, half a dozen cloves and a small red pepper. mer slowly four hours and press through a purèe strainer. and cook five minutes. Put a hard boiled egg chopped fine, a slice of lemon and a tablespoon of catsup into the tureen and pour the hot soup over it.
— Mrs. Wendell S. Sherman
BLACK BEAN (Turtle) SOUP.
One pint of beans soaked over night in one gallon of cold water. In the morning add one-half pound of salt pork, half a pound of beef, one or two onions and carrots grated, pepper and salt and herbs (if you like); when the soup is done strain through a colander, mashing the beans. Before serving add wine, some slices of lemon and balls made of the yolks of hard boiled eggs.
To make balls take raw yolk of egg and mix with hard-boiled yolk and shape with hands dipped in flour.
— Miss Anna M. Rossell
Two versions of the same idea sit side by side here, and the first has been mangled by the scanner: the lines have been transposed. Read it as "Put three cups of black beans into three quarts of cold water. Simmer slowly four hours and press through a purée strainer. Reheat with a soup bone, half a dozen cloves and a small red pepper, and cook five minutes," and it makes sense.
- Soak the beans, whatever the recipe saysNeither version gives the first recipe a soak, though the second soaks a pint overnight in a gallon of water. Three cups of dry black beans want an overnight soak or an hour's rest in boiling water; otherwise four hours of simmering may still leave them gritty and hard to push through a sieve.
- Purée strainerPuree strainer -- A sieve worked with a pestle. A food mill on the medium plate does the same job, and a blender followed by a fine strainer does it faster. The point is to remove the skins and give the soup a smooth body.
- Soup boneA meaty beef shin or marrow bone. Brown it first for colour and depth.
- Salt porkThe half pound of salt pork in the second version brings a good deal of salt of its own, though the recipe also calls for pepper, salt and herbs. Rinse it, taste before adding any salt, and expect to skim the fat off the surface before straining.
- The egg ballsThese are the recipe's one real technique. Mixed raw yolk with mashed hard-boiled yolk, rolled small, they must be dropped into the simmering soup for two or three minutes to set — added to a tureen off the heat they stay raw and slack. Keep them under an inch across.
- WineThe recipe does not say which. A dry sherry or Madeira is the usual choice for this kind of soup, a few tablespoons stirred in off the heat. Any more and it dominates the beans.
- YieldThree quarts of water and three cups of beans should give something like eight servings; the pint-of-beans version starts from a gallon of water with fewer beans, so it will make more and thinner soup. Both thicken overnight and want thinning with stock when reheated.
Mock turtle soup began in eighteenth-century England as a way of imitating expensive green turtle, usually with a calf's head — the gelatinous skin standing in for turtle meat. Black bean soup was later pressed into the same service as a cheaper mock, its dark body, wine, lemon and egg balls reproducing the look and ritual of the turtle tureen. Egg balls are often said to stand in for the prized turtle eggs, though this is a traditional explanation rather than a documented one.