Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Mock Turtle Soup
Take a calf's head, a knuckle of veal, a hock of ham, six potatoes sliced thin, hock of ham, six potatoes sliced thin, three turnips, parsley and sweet marjoram chopped fine, and pepper. Forcemeat balls of veal and beef, half a pint of wine, one dozen egg balls, juice of a lemon.
The calf's head must have had the brains removed, and must have been boiled previously till the meat slips off the bone. The broth must be saved, so as to use in the soup. Cut the head in small pieces after boiling. The veal and ham also must have been boiled and cut up, and all simmered for a couple of hours in the broth made by the calf's head. Now put all together. The forcemeat balls and egg balls should be added, and all boiled about ten minutes.
This is a genuine mock turtle soup built on a whole calf's head, and it belongs to a butchery world that no longer exists. The notes below explain what the ingredients were and why the dish cannot be reproduced today.
- The calf's head is the problemBovine skull, brain, eyes, tonsils and spinal cord are classed as specified risk material in the EU, UK, Canada and the United States because of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, though the age thresholds vary and in several of those jurisdictions the skull and brain of a young calf fall outside the definition, while tonsils are controlled at all ages. Removing the brains, as the recipe directs, does not clear the skull itself, and head meat from cattle is subject to controls in the regulated slaughterhouse rather than in the kitchen.
- No safe home workaroundBSE prions are not destroyed by the long boiling this recipe calls for, nor by any domestic cooking temperature. There is no adjustment to the method that makes a calf's head safe to handle at home. If you want mock turtle soup, use a current recipe from a modern source.
- You could not buy the cut anywayYou could not easily buy the cut anyway -- Split calves' heads have largely disappeared from mainstream retail butchery in most English-speaking countries, though specialist and ethnic butchers may still supply them. What is generally sold as "head meat" is a processed product from inspected plants, not the intact head the recipe assumes.
- What the components wereForcemeat balls are seasoned ground meat bound with egg and crumb, rolled small and poached in the soup. Egg balls are hard-boiled yolks mashed with raw yolk and a little flour, formed into marbles and cooked briefly. Both were standard garnishes for a dressed soup of this class.
- A knuckle of veal and a hock of hamThe knuckle is the lower leg joint, valued for the gelatine it throws; the hock is the corresponding cut on a cured pig's leg, salty and full of collagen. Together they gave the broth the sticky, lip-coating body that was the whole point of a turtle-style soup.
- Duplicated line"hock of ham, six potatoes sliced thin" appears twice. This looks like a duplication in the text rather than a doubled quantity.
- Half a pint of wineIf the book is American, a pint is 16 fl oz, so half a pint is a full cup. The recipe does not say at what point the wine goes in. Madeira or sherry was a common choice for mock turtle.
Mock turtle soup was invented to imitate the real thing: green turtle soup was a luxury of eighteenth and nineteenth-century dining, expensive and dependent on live turtles shipped from the Caribbean, and cooks reached for a calf's head because its gelatinous skin and varied textures came closest to turtle meat once boiled soft. The wine, lemon juice, forcemeat and egg balls are all borrowed straight from the aristocratic turtle recipes it was mimicking. By the time a book like this appeared, mock turtle had long since stopped being a substitute and become a dish in its own right, familiar enough that Lewis Carroll could make a Mock Turtle a character and expect readers to get the joke. Its disappearance from home cooking has two causes: the decline of whole-carcass butchery in ordinary households, and the BSE controls that began in the UK in the late 1980s and were extended through the 1990s, restricting specified tissues by age.