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Mock Turtle Soup
Put on beef and boil very tender; take out, chop fine, and put back to boil. Put potatoes, mace, cloves,(?) parsley, thyme, spice, celery seed, and ten hard--boiled eggs; pepper and salt to your taste.
Thicken with flour and add brandy and wine.--Miss E. P.
This is a contributor's shorthand rather than a worked recipe: no quantities, no times, and a question mark that the compiler herself left in the ingredient list. Treat it as a framework and supply the proportions.
- Scale it yourselfFor about 3 quarts of soup, start with 3 lb of beef shin or shank on the bone in 4 quarts of water. The long, gentle boil the recipe calls for is really 3 hours or more, until the meat shreds; that is where the body of the soup comes from.
- "Spice" means allspiceIn nineteenth-century American receipts "spice" on its own often means allspice, listed separately from the mace and cloves already named. The parenthetical "(?)" beside cloves appears to record some uncertainty on the compiler's part rather than an instruction.
- Whole spices in a bagMace blades, cloves and allspice were most likely whole. Tie them in cheesecloth with the thyme and parsley stems and pull the bundle after 30 to 40 minutes, or the cloves will dominate everything.
- The eggs are the pointTen hard-boiled eggs, quartered or sliced, stand in for the gelatinous green fat and eggs of a real turtle. Add them in the last few minutes only, off the boil, so the whites do not toughen and the yolks stay intact.
- Potatoes and celery seedUse about 1 lb of potatoes, diced, added roughly 25 minutes before serving. Celery seed is potent: half a teaspoon for this volume.
- ThickeningDo not stir dry flour into the pot. Work 3 tablespoons of flour into an equal weight of butter, or slake it in cold water, then whisk it in and simmer 10 minutes so the raw taste cooks out.
- Brandy and wine lastA quarter cup of brandy and half a cup of dry sherry or Madeira, stirred in off the heat, is in keeping with the period. Added early they simply boil away.
- YieldAs scaled above, eight to ten servings as a first course.
Mock turtle soup was the eighteenth-century answer to green turtle, which arrived in British and American ports live and expensive and became one of the great luxury soups. The imitation was normally built on a calf's head, whose gelatinous skin and cheek meat mimicked turtle flesh, with hard-boiled eggs standing in for the turtle's eggs and fat -- a substitution this Virginia version keeps even though it has dropped the head in favor of plain boiled beef. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, advertised contributions from some 250 of Virginia's housewives, and many of its entries read like this one: a note passed between cooks who already knew the proportions, signed only "Miss E. P."