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Mock Turtle Soup
2 quarts cold water 2 tablespoons carrot 2 tablespoons celery 2 sprigs parsley 2 tablespoons chopped ham 8 tablespoons meat from calf's head 1 tablespoon salt 2 cups brown stock 1 tablespoon mushrooms Cover calf's head with cold water. Add vinegar, vegetables and seasonings. Simmer two hours. Remove one cupful of meat. cool; remove fat. add brown stock, Simmer two hours longer. Strain; Brown butter; add flour and brown; strained liquor, chopped ham, calf's head meat, lemon, Madeira and mushrooms. Reheat and serve.
Should it be necessary to keep the soup hot, delay adding wine until serving. 2 ox-tails 1 onion stuck with 6 cloves 4 cup salt pork fat 2 quarts cold water pepper and cayenne 1 cup brown stock
The text as printed is badly scrambled — the ingredient list omits several things the method calls for (vinegar, butter, flour, lemon, Madeira), and the last line belongs to a different soup entirely. Read the method as the authority and treat the list as partial.
- The printing error at the end"2 ox-tails, 1 onion stuck with 6 cloves, 4 cup salt pork fat, 2 quarts cold water, pepper and cayenne, 1 cup brown stock" -- is evidently the ingredient list for a separate ox-tail soup that has bled into this entry. It has nothing to do with this recipe and should be ignored.
- Missing quantitiesThe method calls for vinegar, browned butter and flour, lemon, and Madeira, none of which appear in the list. A workable roux is about 2 tablespoons each butter and flour per quart of finished soup; the vinegar in the initial simmer is unquantified and can be treated as a splash, and lemon and Madeira are added to taste at the end.
- Calf's headNot a supermarket item. Butchers serving Caribbean, Latin American or halal customers will often order half a head, cleaned and split; otherwise ask for veal cheek and a split veal foot together, which gives the same gelatin-heavy, faintly sweet meat and body. The head should arrive scalded and with the brains removed.
- Brown stockIn this period that means a stock built from roasted veal or beef bones and browned mirepoix, unsalted and reduced. A good unsalted beef stock stands in; avoid bouillon cubes, which will fight the tablespoon of salt already in the pot.
- The two-hour splitThe cupful of meat pulled after the first simmer is the garnish, diced small and returned at the end. If it stays in for the full four hours it disintegrates into the liquor and the soup loses its texture.
- The wine instructionThe last line only asks that the Madeira be delayed if the soup has to be held hot, and that is sound: prolonged heat drives off the aromatics. Stir it in off the heat.
- YieldTwo quarts of water plus the 2 cups of brown stock, reduced over four hours, should give something in the region of six to eight cups of finished soup, or about six first-course servings.
Mock turtle soup was made to imitate the green turtle soup that was a luxury of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American dining, when live sea turtles were shipped north and kept alive until wanted. Calf's head was the usual substitute: boiled long enough, the gelatinous skin and cheek meat take on a texture close to turtle, and the browned roux, Madeira and lemon echo the seasoning of the original. By the time this book appeared, in the first decade of the twentieth century, mock turtle had become a dish in its own right rather than a strict imitation. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it pairs its chocolate recipes with a full general cookery section; a soup chapter running from consomme to ox-tail is what a household cook of the period might be expected to have at hand.