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Mace, Cloves, and Salt
Quarter of a pound of lean Ham.
Three ounces of Butter.
Three ounces of Flour, Two glasses of Sherry.
Four quarts of Water.
Juice of half a Lemon.
Wash and bone the head. Tie the meat in a cloth and chop the bones. Put the meat, bones, and four quarts of cold water into a stewpan, place it on the fire, add some salt, let it boil up, and skim well. Let it boil about three hours.
Strain the stock into a basin to get cold, then carefully remove the fat. Melt the butter in a stewpan; then put in the vegetables, cleaned and cut up small, the ham cut into dice, and the herbs and spices; add the flour, and stir well.
Fry all these for five minutes, brown all slowly together until a golden-brown colour. Now add the stock, stir until boiling, move the stewpan to the side of the fire, and let it simmer ten minutes. Put in the sherry, lemon-juice, salt and cayenne, and strain the soup into another stewpan. Cut some of the calf's head into small neat pieces, and serve it in the soup. Make some veal stuffing as follows: Two ounces of beef suet, three ounces of bread-crumbs, one teaspoonful of chopped parsley, a quarter of a teaspoonful of chopped thyme and marjoram, half a teaspoonful of grated lemon-peel, a little nutmeg, one egg, pepper and salt; mix these all together, and roll into small balls. Poach these in salted water and then put them into the soup.
C 2
This is mock turtle soup, printed here with the head of its ingredient list running back onto the previous page — the title line "Mace, Cloves, and Salt" is the tail of that list, and the vegetables and herbs called for in the method were named there too. Assume onion, carrot, turnip and celery, a bouquet of parsley and thyme, a blade of mace, a few cloves and a bayleaf.
- The missing headThe recipe never states the quantity of calf's head; it presumably stood in the truncated portion of the ingredient list. Four quarts of water with this quantity of ham and butter suggests a half head, split and cleaned. Butchers will generally supply one on order, though rarely off the shelf.
- Glasses and quartsA "glass" of sherry in Victorian and Edwardian kitchen books is a wine glass, roughly 2 fl oz, so two glasses is about half a cup. The four quarts are imperial, near 4.5 litres in modern terms; the finished soup reduces to something under that.
- The stock must be chilledStraining into a basin to get cold is not a convenience step. A calf's head releases a great deal of fat, and it lifts off far more cleanly as a set cap once the stock is thoroughly cold. Skimming hot stock tends to leave the soup greasy.
- Browning the rouxThe hinge of the dish. Vegetables, diced ham, spices and flour are fried together and then browned slowly to golden-brown; five minutes gets it started, but the colour takes longer over low heat. Scorched flour turns the whole pot bitter and no amount of sherry will hide it.
- "The side of the fire"On a coal range the cool edge of the top plate held a pot just below boiling. Use the lowest burner setting or a heat diffuser; ten minutes at a bare simmer is what is wanted, not a rolling boil that would cloud the strained soup.
- Sherry and lemon go in lastBoth are added after the simmering and immediately before straining, so the alcohol keeps its aroma and the acid does not sit on the heat. Taste for cayenne at this point rather than earlier.
- The forcemeat ballsTwo ounces of beef suet is about 60 g, shredded; three ounces of breadcrumbs is roughly a cup and a half of fresh crumbs. Roll them no bigger than a hazelnut and poach in salted water at a gentle tremble, three to four minutes, until firm and floating. Poaching them separately keeps the soup clear.
- YieldFour quarts of stock makes a large quantity, enough for a dozen or more first-course servings. The reserved head meat should be cut small enough to take up on a spoon, with a few pieces and two or three balls to a plate.
Mock turtle soup was devised to imitate real turtle soup, which from the mid eighteenth century onward was the most conspicuously expensive dish an English host could put on a table, made from live green turtles shipped from the West Indies. A calf's head, gelatinous once cooked, was the accepted substitute, and the whole apparatus of brown roux, ham, mace and cloves, sherry, lemon and forcemeat balls exists to reproduce the flavour and the look of the original. By the time this book was written the imitation had long outlived any pretence and stood as a dish in its own right, a fixture of club and hotel menus and of the tinned soup trade. The forcemeat balls are often said to stand in for the turtle's own egg-like fat, and the split page here — the ingredient list broken across a leaf, with the signature mark "C 2" at the foot — is a reminder that these were working printed books, set economically and read at the kitchen table.