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Remove (Head boil stock until reduced)
head; boil stock until reduced to one quart. Strain and cool. Melt and brown butter, add flour, and stir until well browned; then pour on slowly brown stock. Add headstock, tomato, one cup face-meat cut in dice, and lemon juice. Simmer five minutes; add Royal custard cut in dice, and Egg Balls, or Force-meat Balls. Add Madeira wine, and salt and pepper to taste.
1/3 cup sliced onion Carrot Turnip } 1/3 cup each, cut in dice 2 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon salt 1 teaspoon peppercorns 4 cloves 3 sprigs thyme 1 sprig marjoram 2 sprigs parsley 1/2 bay leaf 3 quarts cold water Consommé 3 lbs. beef, poorer part of round 1 lb. marrow-bone 3 lbs. knuckle of veal 1 quart chicken stock
This page is a fragment: it picks up mid-sentence from a longer mock turtle soup built on a calf's head, and the ingredient list at the end belongs to the consommé. Treat it as a method sketch rather than a complete working recipe, and note that no quantities are given for the flour, butter, tomato, lemon juice or wine.
- "Remove" is a course, not a techniqueIn a formal menu of this period a remove was the dish brought in to replace another between courses, often a heavy soup or a boiled joint. The word here labels the soup's place at table, not anything you do to it.
- The missing headThe page opens mid-instruction; the preceding lines, not reproduced here, would have dealt with cooking the head (a calf's head in the standard mock turtle soup, which the face-meat and headstock point to). A whole calf's head is now a special order from a butcher, and a modern cook working from this outline would need those earlier instructions to have any chance of following it.
- Face-meatThe gelatinous meat and skin from the cheek and jaw of the head, cut in dice. It is what gives mock turtle soup its slippery, turtle-like texture; brisket or shin will taste right but will not behave the same way.
- Brown the roux properlyThis is the hinge. The butter and flour must be cooked to a genuine deep brown before the stock goes in, and the stock must be added slowly and off the boil to keep it smooth. A pale roux gives a soup that tastes of raw flour and looks grey.
- Royal custard and egg ballsBoth are garnishes made elsewhere in the book: royal custard is an unsweetened egg-and-stock custard set gently in a shallow pan (steamed or in a water bath), cooled, and cut in dice; egg balls are hard-boiled yolks worked with raw yolk, rolled small and cooked in water. Neither survives long boiling, which is why they go in at the end.
- Five minutes means five minutesThe five-minute simmer follows the diced face-meat, tomato and lemon juice; the custard dice and egg balls go in only afterwards. The meat and garnishes are already cooked, and prolonged simmering will break the custard dice apart.
- Madeira off the heatThe wine goes in at the very end; do not let the soup boil after it, or the aroma cooks off and only the acidity remains. No quantity is given in the recipe.
Mock turtle soup was created to imitate the real thing: green sea turtle soup was a luxury of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American dining, and cooks found that a calf's head, with its gelatinous skin and cheek meat, gave a similar richness at a fraction of the cost. By the time books of this kind reached print the imitation was a standard of the formal menu, dressed up with Madeira, forcemeat balls and diced savory custard. The elaborate garnishes are the tell: this is a dish from an era when a soup could require several separate sub-recipes made in advance.