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Mock Turtle Soup
½ teaspoon peppercorns 6 allspice berries 2 sprigs thyme 1/3 cup sliced onion 1/3 cup carrot, cut in dice 2 cups brown stock 1/4 cup butter ½ cup flour 1 cup stewed and strained tomatoes Juice 1/2 lemon Madeira wine Clean and wash calf's head; soak one hour in cold water to cover. Cook until tender in three quarts boiling salted water (to which seasoning and vegetables have been added).
The text as printed is a fragment: the ingredient list is missing the calf's head itself (Farmer's original calls for half a head), and the method breaks off after the initial simmer. Treat what follows as a guide to reading the recipe rather than a complete working procedure.
- What the finished method wasThe printed text stops after the simmer, so this is a reconstruction from the ingredient list: the meat is cut from the bone in dice, the cooking liquor strained, and a brown roux of the butter and flour used to thicken it, with tomato, lemon juice and Madeira added towards the end and the diced meat returned to warm through.
- Calf's headA whole or half calf's head is a special order from a halal, Hispanic or old-style butcher, and usually has to be ordered in advance. It arrives split, sometimes with the brains and tongue separate. Roughly 3-4 lb of veal shank, breast and a split veal knuckle gives you similar gelatin and diced meat if a head is not to be had.
- CleaningCleaning means scraping and singeing off any remaining hair, cutting out the eyes and the ear canals, and rinsing until the water runs clear. The hour's soak in cold water draws out blood and keeps the broth pale; change the water once if it clouds badly.
- Cooking time"Until tender" is two to three hours at a bare simmer. A hard boil emulsifies the fat and turns the broth cloudy and greasy.
- Brown stockFarmer's brown stock is built on shin of beef and bone, with part of the meat browned before simmering. Any well-reduced unsalted beef stock stands in; avoid anything sweetened or heavily salted, since the liquor from the head is already salted.
- MadeiraNo quantity is given. A quarter cup for this volume is a reasonable starting point, added after the pot leaves the heat so the aroma survives.
- YieldThree quarts of cooking water plus 2 cups of stock reduces to roughly 8-10 servings as a first course.
Mock turtle soup was invented to imitate real green turtle soup, an eighteenth-century luxury that depended on live sea turtles shipped from the Caribbean; a calf's head, with its mix of gelatinous skin and lean meat, was found to give a similar unctuous texture and was vastly cheaper. The imitation became a dish in its own right, familiar enough by the 1860s that Lewis Carroll could put a Mock Turtle into Alice the calf's head and hooves come from Tenniel's illustration rather than Carroll's text. That Fannie Farmer still prints it in the Boston Cooking-School book at the turn of the century says something about the American household of the period: a half calf's head was ordinary butcher's stock, and the long labor of cleaning and boning it was assumed to be available. Green turtle is now protected under national law and CITES, and the mock version outlived its model.