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
240. Halve a calf's head, take out the brains, and put as much water as you wish to make soup, with sweet herbs, parsley, a few onions, and some lemon peel. Stew it gently until the meat is tender; then take it out and let it get cold; thicken the soup with a little flour and butter, and strain it through a sieve. Add sherry wine, a little walnut and mushroom ketchup, pounded mace, and cayenne. Take the brains and beat them up with a little flour and two eggs into a light batter, adding pepper and salt, and some parsley chopped very fine; then take the yolks of two eggs and beat them up; make them into as many portions as you please, tying each in a bit of muslin, and boil them in little round balls; the batter made with the brains is to be fried into cakes a light brown. When the head is cold it must be cut into small pieces and laid in the gravy, the cakes and eggs, with some forcemeat balls, to be laid on the top of the soup just before it is sent to table. Every particle of fat must be removed from the surface before warming the soup for the table.
Another Receipt. -Cut one neat's foot and two calf's feet in thin slices; if you like ox palates, six will do, and in that case only one calf's foot will be required. Boil these till tender enough for a fricassee. Put them into a full quart of good mutton-gravy, entirely free from fat; cover it down close, and let it stew gently rather more than three-quarters of an hour with the following-one large onion, one dozen of bearded oysters and their liquor, and some lemon peel, a large bunch of sweet-herbs, a good-sized anchovy, some salt, nutmeg, and cayenne. The onion, oysters, herbs, anchovy, and lemon
This is a nineteenth-century mock-turtle soup in two versions, both built on the gelatinous cuts that once stood in for real turtle. The first version cannot be made today, and several of its ingredients no longer exist in commerce; the notes below are for reading rather than cooking.
- The brains are the disqualifying ingredientCalf brain and the spinal tissue attached to a split head are the tissues that carry the BSE agent, which causes variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. There is no cooking step, no length of stewing and no temperature that inactivates it. Frying the brain batter into cakes does nothing to make it safe.
- Splitting the head is part of the problemHalving a calf's head exposes the spinal cord and skull cavity and spreads that tissue across the whole preparation. Bovine skull and brain are classed as specified risk material and excluded from the food chain above a set age -- over 12 months in the UK and EU, 30 months and over in the US -- so split heads and brains are restricted and in practice hard to obtain. If you want mock turtle, use a current recipe from a reliable modern source.
- Neat's foot and ox palatesA "neat" is an ox, so a neat's foot is cow heel; ox palates are the roof of the mouth, prized for turning silky-gelatinous after long boiling. Both were butcher's staples in Victorian Britain and are now specialist orders at best, palates practically unobtainable.
- Walnut and mushroom ketchupNeither resembles tomato ketchup. Both were thin, dark, salty, near-black seasoning liquors -- mushroom ketchup is still made commercially, walnut ketchup rarely. Worcestershire sauce descends from the same family of savoury condiments.
- Pounded maceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold in blades in this period and pounded in a mortar as needed. Ground mace from a jar is the equivalent, and a very small quantity goes a long way.
- The egg ballsBeaten yolks tied in muslin and boiled were a garnish for turtle and mock-turtle soup, usually explained as imitating the turtle's eggs.
- The oysters in the second version"Bearded" means the frill has been trimmed off. The oysters go in for the whole of the long stew, rather more than three-quarters of an hour, and contribute their liquor; the recipe's final line, which breaks off here, begins to deal separately with the onion, oysters, herbs, anchovy and lemon.
- A quartAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, about 1.14 litres -- a quarter more than a US quart. British books of this date normally mean the imperial measure.
Mock turtle grew directly out of the eighteenth-century vogue for real turtle soup, a luxury of City banquets and civic dinners made from live green turtles shipped from the West Indies. The imitation used a calf's head because the skin and gelatinous meat, once long-stewed, gave the same lip-sticking body and the same pale, irregular pieces suspended in a dark, spiced, sherry-laced broth; the herbs, mace, cayenne, anchovy and ketchup were there to reproduce the deep savour rather than any specific flavour of turtle. By the middle of the nineteenth century mock turtle had outgrown its model and was a respectable dish in its own right, widely printed in British cookery books of the period, sometimes with several competing receipts as here -- and Lewis Carroll's Mock Turtle, weeping over what he used to be, turned on readers knowing the soup was made of calf. Later generations reduced it to a tinned or bottled soup, and the calf's head version had largely faded out before the food-safety rules that now rule it out entirely.