Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Jugged Soup
6 potatoes 1 onion 6 tomatoes, or 2 cups canned tomatoes 1 turnip 1 can peas 1 grated carrot 1/4 cup rice 3 qts. water 1 tablespoon salt 1 tablespoon sugar 1/2 teaspoon pepper 1 pinch allspice Slice vegetables and place with seasonings in alternate layers in the bottom of a stone crock with a cover. Boil any carcasses of cold fowl, bones of waste meat, or steak with trimmings, in 3 quarts water, until reduced to 2 quarts. Strain, cool and remove fat. Pour the broth over the vegetables, put on the cover, and seal with paste to keep in the steam. Set jar in pan of hot water. Place in oven and cook from four to six hours.
Calf's Head or Mock Turtle Soup 1 calf's head 2 qts. brown stock 2 qts. water 1/3 cup {sliced onion, carrot cut in dice 2 tablespoons butter 4 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 6 cloves 1 blade mace 6 allspice berries 1 chili 2 sprigs thyme 1 tablespoon salt Clean calf's head thoroughly cut in half and wash in salt water. Remove brains and tie them in coarse muslin, to be cooked separately. Cook calf's head until tender (about five hours), in 4 quarts salted water. Remove meat from bones, return bones to the kettle, add vegetables and seasonings, and boil until the water is reduced to 2 quarts. Strain and cool. Remove fat and add the brown stock. Then melt and brown the butter, add flour, cook until smooth, combine with soup for thickening and simmer for five minutes. Cut tongue into dice. Chop the meat fine. Cook the brains twenty minutes and pound with the chopped meat. Season with salt, pepper and thyme. Add a little beaten egg to bind it together, shape in small balls and fry them brown in a little butter. Put meat balls and diced tongue into a tureen and strain the hot soup over them. The soup is usually served with thin slices of lemon and sometimes a teaspoon of catsup is added.
The soup may be put up in sterilized glass jars.
Two recipes share this page. The first is an ordinary long-cooked vegetable and bone-broth soup; the second, Calf's Head or Mock Turtle, calls for brain tissue and ends with an instruction to put the soup up in glass jars. That second recipe cannot be made safely today, and the notes below explain why rather than how to fix it.
- Brains and BSEThe mock turtle soup depends on calf's brains, poached and pounded into forcemeat balls. Bovine brain and spinal cord are specified risk materials for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, whose human form, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, is invariably fatal and is not destroyed by cooking. Their sale for food is restricted or banned in the US, the UK and the EU, and no cooking time makes them safe.
- Calf's head itselfBeyond the brains, a whole split head is not a cut most butchers stock, and the recipe's five hours of simmering assumes a scalded, thoroughly cleaned head. Head meat and tongue are still eaten, but this dish should be approached only through a current recipe from a supplier who can vouch for the source.
- The canning line"The soup may be put up in sterilized glass jars" is the most dangerous sentence on the page. Meat stock is a low-acid food; sterilising the empty jar does nothing to the contents, and without a pressure canner run to a measured time and pressure, Clostridium botulinum spores survive and germinate in the sealed, oxygen-free jar. Follow current USDA guidance for any home canning of stock or soup.
- Sealing the crock with pasteThe paste seal on the jugged soup is a seal against escaping steam, not a preservation method. It does not make the finished soup shelf-stable in any way.
- "Jugged"The name refers to the vessel and the method rather than to any ingredient: food sealed in a covered stoneware jar or crock and set in a pan of hot water in the oven, so it cooks gently in its own steam. A heavy lidded casserole in a water bath is the same idea.
- Oven heat for the jugged soupThe original gives no temperature. Four to six hours in a water bath implies a low oven; in any case the pan of hot water holds the crock's contents at or below boiling point.
- Quantities and yieldThree quarts of water reduced to two, poured over six potatoes, six tomatoes, a turnip, a can of peas and rice, makes a large potful; the recipe states no yield. '1 can peas' is not a standardised measure and period can sizes varied, but a modern 15-ounce can is a workable stand-in.
- Brown stockThe mock turtle recipe's two quarts of brown stock means beef bones roasted before simmering. It is not the same as the broth made from unroasted carcasses and waste bones in the jugged soup above it.
Mock turtle soup was invented to imitate a luxury: real green turtle soup was a status dish in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and America, and a calf's head, with its mix of gelatinous skin, tongue and soft meat, was the closest cheap approximation to turtle flesh and its texture. By the time the Gold Medal Flour Cook Book appeared, mock turtle had long since stopped being a substitute and become a dish in its own right, familiar enough that Lewis Carroll could build a character out of it. Its appearance here beside jugged soup, which is essentially a way of using up cold fowl carcasses and waste meat bones, shows the two ends of a period soup chapter: one recipe salvaging scraps in a sealed crock at the back of the oven, the other spending five hours on a head to reach a grand table. The closing suggestion to jar the surplus reflects the confident, pre-scientific home canning of the era, written before the microbiology of botulism in low-acid foods was widely understood.