Home › Soups › Mock Turtle Soup
Mock Turtle Soup
1 calf's head 6 cloves 1/2 teaspoon peppercorns 6 allspice berries 2 sprigs thyme 1/3 cup sliced onion 1/3 cup carrot, cut in dice 2 cups brown stock 1/4 cup butter 1/2 cup flour 1 cup stewed and strained tomatoes Juice 1/2 lemon Madeira wine Clean and wash calf's head; soak one hour in cold water to cover. Cook until tender in three quarts boiling salted water (to which seasoning and vegetables have been added). Remove head; boil stock until reduced to one quart. Strain and cool. Melt and brown butter, add flour, and stir until well browned; then pour on slowly brown stock. Add head stock, tomato, one cup face-meat cut in dice, and lemon juice. Simmer five minutes; add Royal custard cut in dice, and Egg Balls, or Force-meat Balls. Add Madeira wine, and salt and pepper to taste.
A full nineteenth-century mock turtle, built on a whole calf's head rather than turtle meat. The work is mostly in the long simmer and the reduction; the garnishes are separate recipes the book assumes you have already read.
- Sourcing the headA whole split calf's head, skin on, is a special order from a halal or Latin butcher or a farm abattoir; ask for it split and the brains removed. If none is available, 3 lb of veal cheek and shank with a split calf's foot for gelatin gives a comparable stock and dice-able meat.
- Time to tenderNo cooking time is given. A calf's head in three quarts of salted water needs roughly 2 1/2 to 3 hours at a bare simmer, until the cheek meat pulls easily from the bone. Skim the grey scum in the first fifteen minutes or the finished soup will be muddy.
- The reduction is the pointThree quarts down to one quart is what makes this soup rather than boiled veal water. Reduce uncovered, and do it before you chill and skim, since the fat cap is much easier to lift off cold stock.
- Brown the roux properlyButter browned, then flour stirred "until well browned" means a brick-coloured roux, five to eight minutes over medium heat past the pale stage. Add the hot stock in a slow stream off the heat to avoid lumps. This is the hinge: a blond roux leaves the soup tasting raw and floury.
- "Face-meat"The meat from the cheek and jowl, plus the gelatinous skin, cut in 1/4-inch dice. A head yields well more than the one cup called for; the remainder is good cold with mustard.
- Royal custard and egg ballsBoth are separate garnish recipes elsewhere in the book. Royal custard is a savoury baked egg custard set in a shallow pan, chilled and cut in dice; egg balls are hard-boiled yolks bound with raw yolk, rolled small and poached. Either can be skipped without harming the soup.
- MadeiraNo quantity is given. About 1/4 cup for the whole potful is in keeping, added off the heat so the aroma survives. Use a dry Sercial or Verdelho, not a cooking madeira.
- YieldCloser to eight cups of finished soup once stock, tomato and meat are counted; six to eight as a first course.
Mock turtle soup was made as a substitute for the real thing: green sea turtle, shipped alive from the Caribbean, was a status dish in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and America and ruinously expensive. Cooks found that a calf's head, with its mix of lean meat, fat and gelatinous skin, mimicked turtle's varied textures closely enough, and the seasoning conventions of turtle soup came with it: allspice, cloves, thyme, lemon and a heavy hand with madeira. The egg balls are often said to stand in for turtle eggs, though the diced custard is harder to account for that way. By the time this book was printed the mock version had long outlived its model in domestic cookery, and it survives in the American Midwest as a tomato-thickened, often beef-based soup with no calf's head in sight.