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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Ox-Cheek Soup
236. Ox-tail Soup is merely the stewed ox-cheek (which see), with the soup somewhat reduced, and, if approved of, thickened like the ox-tail soup.
POT-AU-FEU. 237. The celebrated French Pot-au-Feu, according to the recognised authority of M. Soyer, consists of six pounds of beef, four quarts of water set near the fire, and skimmed; when nearly boiling, add a spoonful and a half of salt, half a pound of liver, two carrots, four turnips, eight young or two old leeks, one head of celery, two onions (one of them burnt), with a clove in each, and a piece of parsnip. Skim again, and simmer four or five hours, adding a little cold water now and then; take off part of the fat, put slices of bread into the tureen, lay half of the vegetables over, and half the broth, and serve the meat (bouilli) separately with the other half of the vegetables. FRENCH SOUP (VERY GOOD AND CHEAP). 238. A sheep's head and pluck boiled gently in a gallon of water till reduced to half the quantity, a small teacupful of pearl-barley, six large onions, one turnip, one carrot, a bunch of sweet herbs, and a few cloves and peppercorns. Add a little mushroom ketchup, and thicken with some flour rolled in a lump of butter. It is better to boil it the day before it is wanted. Cut the meat off the head in slices as for hashed calf's head (taking it out for this purpose as soon as it is sufficiently tender), and then into small squares, which must be put into the soup again when it is warmed up for use. Finish it up with forcemeat and little egg-balls, and a teacupful of white wine, which, with the addition of a little sugar, makes it nearly equal to mock-turtle.
Three entries sit together here: a one-line note on ox-cheek and ox-tail soup, Alexis Soyer's pot-au-feu, and a sheep's head broth offered as a cheap stand-in for mock turtle. The first two are workable with modern notes; the third is not, for the reasons below.
- The sheep's head is the problemA whole sheep's head boiled in the pot brings the skull and its contents, including brain, into the broth. Ovine skull and brain from older animals are classed as specified risk material in the UK and EU and may not enter the food chain, because of the transmissible spongiform encephalopathy family of diseases. This entry should be read, not cooked.
- "Pluck" is also off the tablePluck means the lungs, heart and liver taken out together. Lungs cannot legally be sold for human food in the United States, and whole plucks are rarely offered at retail in Britain today. Any substitution loses much of what the recipe is doing.
- Ox-cheek, by contrast, is ordinary butcheryBeef cheek is muscle, widely sold, and needs three to four hours of gentle simmering to become tender. The book's entry 236 is only a cross-reference telling you to reduce the ox-cheek stewing liquor; it is not a standalone method.
- Soyer's proportionsSix pounds of beef to four quarts (16 cups) of water gives perhaps eight to ten servings of broth plus a separate meat course. Use a shin, brisket or a piece of rump with bone; the four to five hours of simmering is right for those cuts.
- "Set near the fire" means very low heatThe pot goes on slowly so the albumen rises as scum instead of clouding the liquid. On a modern hob that is the lowest setting, aiming for a bare tremble at the surface rather than a boil, and skimming twice as directed.
- The burnt onionOne onion is deliberately scorched, cut side down on a dry pan or directly on the hob, until black. It is there for colour, giving the broth its amber tone, and costs nothing.
- BouilliThe boiled beef served separately with the remaining vegetables. Slice it across the grain and moisten it with a little of the broth; it dries out fast once out of the liquid.
- Old measures in the third recipeA teacupful is usually reckoned at about 5 to 6 fl oz, roughly two-thirds to three quarters of a cup. Mushroom ketchup is a thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, still sold in Britain and quite different in use from tomato ketchup, though the two share the same ancestry of "ketchups".
Pot-au-feu is the domestic backbone of French cooking, one pot yielding a broth course and a boiled meat course, and the version here is credited to Alexis Soyer, the Reform Club chef whose Gastronomic Regenerator and cheap-cookery writing made him one of the most quoted culinary authorities in mid-Victorian Britain. The company it keeps on this page is telling: ox-cheek, ox-tail and a sheep's head with its pluck were among the cheapest animal protein a nineteenth-century household could buy, and long simmering was the usual way to make them palatable. The final flourish, forcemeat balls, egg-balls, white wine and a little sugar to bring the sheep's head "nearly equal to mock-turtle", shows the era's ladder of imitation: mock turtle was already a calf's-head substitute for real turtle soup, and this is a substitute for the substitute.