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Mock Turtle Broth
One ounce Liebig's beef extract, 1 ounce Armour's Vigoral, 1½ ounce barley oatmeal or starch, ¼ ounce gelatin, 3 drams tincture bitter orange peel, 18 drops tincture of capsicum, 3 drams lime juice, 3 drams Worcestershire sauce, ¾ ounce salt, hot water to make 16 ounces. Make a thin paste from the starch or other material, swell the gelatin in cold water, dissolve the beef extract in hot water with the salt, add to the hot mixture the starch paste and softened gelatin and bring all to a boil, strain through a wire strainer, add the flavoring and hot water to finish. Use ½ ounces of the mixture to a mug.
This is a fountain concentrate, not a soup: sixteen ounces of thickened beef-extract base that gets spooned into a mug and topped with hot water. Two of the four brand-name ingredients no longer exist, and the measurements are apothecary rather than kitchen.
- Read the ounces carefullyThe dry ingredients (extract, barley flour, gelatin, salt) are weight ounces; the tinctures, lime juice and Worcestershire in drams are fluid measure, and "hot water to make 16 ounces" is a finished volume. A fluid dram is about 3.7 ml, so 3 drams is about 11 ml, a little over two teaspoons.
- Liebig's and VigoralBoth were concentrated beef extracts sold in jars, thick and dark like yeast extract. The Liebig's Extract of Meat Company's line survives through Oxo, and comparable pastes such as Bovril are close in character; Armour's Vigoral is long gone. Two ounces total of any modern beef extract paste stands in, though salt levels vary and you should taste before adding the full ¾ ounce.
- The salt is not a misprintThree quarters of an ounce of salt in a pint sounds violent, but the pint is a concentrate and only half an ounce of it goes into a mug of hot water. Judge the seasoning in the finished mug, not the pot.
- The tincturesTincture of bitter orange peel and tincture of capsicum came off the pharmacy shelf next to the soda fountain, both alcoholic extracts. Orange bitters is the closest current equivalent to the first; the second is simply capsicum heat, and eighteen drops is a small amount of a very hot preparation.
- "Barley oatmeal or starch"Any fine starch that will make a slurry: barley flour, oat flour, cornstarch or arrowroot. Half an ounce in a pint is a light thickening, meant to give the broth body on the tongue rather than to make it soupy.
- Gelatin does the real workA quarter ounce is roughly one envelope of modern powdered gelatin. Bloom it in cold water first as directed, and be aware that the concentrate will set solid when cold and needs rewarming to be dispensed.
- Add the flavorings off the heatThe tinctures, lime juice and Worcestershire go in after the boil and after straining, as written. Boiling them drives off the volatile orange oil and dulls the Worcestershire.
- YieldSixteen ounces of concentrate at half an ounce per mug is about thirty-two servings. The recipe does not say how much hot water is used to fill the mug.
Mock turtle soup was an eighteenth-century English economy: real turtle being costly and seasonal, cooks imitated it with a boiled calf's head, whose gelatinous meat gave the same unctuous texture, sharpened with lemon, cayenne and Madeira. By the time this book was written the name had drifted loose from the calf entirely and meant a flavor profile — beefy, tart, peppery, faintly bitter with orange — which is exactly what is being assembled here out of jarred extract, gelatin for body and a pharmacist's tinctures for the sharp notes. Hot beverages mattered to the American soda fountain because the fountain otherwise went quiet from November to March, and the same marble counter that sold phosphates in July sold beef tea, clam bouillon and broths like this one in winter. That the recipe is written in drams and drops rather than spoonfuls is a reminder that the soda fountain usually stood inside a drugstore.