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Mock Turtle Soup
1 calf's head 3 quarts water 6 potatoes 2 hard-boiled eggs 1 lemon 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce 2 tablespoons butter 1/2 tablespoon sweet marjoram Salt and pepper Clean the calf's head thoroughly and boil it in the water until tender; then pick the meat from the bones and cut it into small pieces. Add the potatoes cut into small dice, the eggs, chopped, the lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce and butter: season with salt, pepper and sweet marjoram; use drop dumplings if desired.
A plain, late-style mock turtle soup that leans on the calf's head for both body and meat. The recipe assumes a butcher who will split and clean a head for you, and a cook who knows the head is also the stock.
- The stray ingredient listThe final line — 1 pound beef, 1 quart okras, 1 small onion, 1 sprig parsley — has nothing to do with this soup and appears to be the opening of the next recipe, most likely an okra or gumbo soup. Ignore it.
- Sourcing the headA whole calf's head is a special order from a halal, Latin American or old-line butcher, and it must come split, with the brains and eyes removed and the nasal passages cleaned. A workable substitute is 2 lb veal cheek or shank plus one split veal foot, which gives the same gelatin and shreddable meat in the same 3 quarts of water.
- Cleaning "thoroughly"This means soaking the split head in several changes of cold water for an hour or two, then blanching it: cover with cold water, bring to a boil, drain, rinse off the scum, and start again with the measured 3 quarts. Skipping the blanch gives a cloudy, muttony broth.
- How long is "until tender"Two and a half to three hours at a bare simmer for a calf's head, less for cheeks. The meat should pull from the bone with no resistance. A hard boil clouds the stock and toughens the lean muscle before the connective tissue gives way.
- Potatoes go in lateThe recipe does add the potatoes after the meat is picked, but gives no time for them; small-dice potatoes need only 12 to 15 minutes in the broth. Do not put them in during the long boil, or they disintegrate.
- Season last, and tasteThe head releases a good deal of gelatin and the broth reduces as it cooks, and the recipe does put the salt, pepper and marjoram at the end. The lemon juice, Worcestershire and butter are best stirred in off the heat: the acid and the sauce carry most of the flavour here, and boiling dulls both.
- Sweet marjoramHalf a tablespoon of dried marjoram, the mild sweet variety rather than oregano. If using fresh, roughly triple it and add in the last few minutes.
- Drop dumplingsNo dumpling recipe is given, so the reader was presumably expected to know one or to find it elsewhere. A plain flour-and-baking-powder drop batter, simmered covered on the finished soup for about 12 minutes, suits the dish.
- YieldThree quarts of liquid plus the meat from a whole head is a great deal of soup — eight to ten generous servings. It gels solid in the refrigerator and reheats well.
Mock turtle soup was invented to stand in for green turtle soup, the eighteenth-century luxury dish of the English tavern and civic dinner, at a time when live sea turtles were shipped from the West Indies at enormous cost. A calf's head was the accepted substitute because the gelatinous skin and cheek meat, once boiled and cut into cubes, mimic the texture of turtle fat and the calipash and calipee of the real thing. The dish crossed to America early and stayed on hotel and household menus well into the twentieth century, though the grand versions — fortified with madeira, veal forcemeat balls and a long-cooked brown stock — gradually shed their trimmings. What survives here is the frugal domestic end of that line: an economical cut, a few potatoes, chopped hard-boiled egg that is often read as standing in for the turtle's own eggs, and lemon and Worcestershire that may well be doing the work a glass of sherry once did.