Home › Soups › Egg Balls (Bone half a calf's head)
Egg Balls (Bone half a calf's head)
Bone half a calf's head and parboil it in plenty of cold water with a little salt for twenty minutes. Take it out, let it get cold, then trim away all the rough parts. Place the half head in a stewpan with the knuckle of veal, ham, all the vegetables cleaned and cut up, all the herbs and a quart of stock; let this all boil quickly until the stock is reduced to a glaze, then fill up the stewpan with cold water (about two quarts); when it boils, skim it well and keep it gently boiling until the calf's head is quite tender; lift the head carefully out with a slice and set it aside to get cool. Strain the stock through a hair-sieve or cloth, when cold remove all the grease and clarify it with the two pounds of beef scraped (proceed as in Consommé). When clarified, cut up some of the calf's head into pieces one inch square, put these into the soup with the sherry, cayenne, lemon-juice, salt to taste, egg balls and small quenelles.
This is the soup base for a Victorian mock turtle — the page title comes from the garnish listed at the end rather than the body of the method. Like most entries in books of this class, it assumes a quantities list printed elsewhere; several ingredients are named without amounts.
- The missing ingredient listThe method refers to "the knuckle of veal, ham, all the vegetables, all the herbs" as though they had already been specified. Working proportions for half a calf's head would be a veal knuckle of about 2 lb, 1/2 lb raw ham or gammon, two onions, two carrots, a stick of celery, a bay leaf, thyme and parsley stalks. Treat those as a reconstruction, not the author's figures.
- The hinge: reduce to a glaze firstBoiling the quart of stock down until it films the bottom of the pan concentrates and lightly caramelises it, and contributes much of the finished soup's colour and depth. If you top up with water before the reduction is properly sticky and dark, the soup is likely to come out paler and thinner, and later simmering will not really make up for it.
- Sourcing a calf's headA boned half head is a special order from a butcher and rarely stocked. Some cooks substitute two split veal shanks plus a piece of blanched, boned veal breast for body, though neither gives the gelatinous texture the recipe is built around.
- TimingsTwenty minutes' parboil from cold is right for blanching. The long simmer to tender takes roughly 1 1/2 to 2 hours for a half head — test with a skewer at the thickest part. Keep it at a bare tremble; a rolling boil emulsifies the fat back into the stock and no clarification will clear it.
- Clarifying with scraped beefTwo pounds of lean beef scraped to a paste, mixed with a little cold stock, is stirred into the cold degreased liquid and brought slowly up to a simmer, then left unstirred once it warms. (Many consommé clarifications of this type also use egg white; this recipe does not say so, referring you instead to its own Consommé entry.) The raft should not be allowed to boil. Ladle the clear soup off through a cloth rather than pouring.
- Egg balls and quenellesEgg balls are generally hard-boiled yolks pounded with a little raw yolk to bind, rolled small, and poached briefly in simmering stock; formulas vary, some adding butter, flour or seasoning. The quenelles are a veal or chicken forcemeat, shaped with two teaspoons and poached the same way. Both are best added at the last moment; they toughen if held in hot soup.
- Sherry, cayenne and lemonAdd these off the heat or at the barest simmer. Sherry boiled in the soup loses its aroma, and lemon juice added early flattens over a long hold.
- Hair sieveA fine mesh sieve lined with a double thickness of damp muslin does the same work. Wet the cloth first or it will absorb a surprising amount of stock.
- YieldRoughly two quarts of finished clear soup, which serves eight to ten as a first course.
This is mock turtle soup in all but name — a long-established imitation of the real green turtle soup that had been a luxury of English public dinners since the eighteenth century, and one that appears in English cookery books from the mid-eighteenth century onward. A boned calf's head, with its mixture of lean meat, gelatinous skin and fat, was held to approximate the texture of turtle when cut in inch squares, and the sherry, cayenne and lemon are the standard turtle seasonings carried over wholesale. The egg balls that give this page its title are often said to be the clearest sign of the imitation: on the traditional interpretation they stand in for the unlaid eggs found inside a female turtle, which were prized in the genuine article and reproduced in the mock version with pounded hard-boiled yolk — though egg balls were also a routine garnish in clear soups generally. By the time books of "high class cookery" were being written for professional and upper-servant cooks, recipes like this one were taught as a set piece of consommé technique — a reduction to a glaze, and a beef clarification — as much as for the sake of the soup itself.