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Mock-Turtle Soup
Clean thoroughly one calf's head. Cover with cold water and let soak for an hour, then put into three quarts of boiling water seasoned with one-third cup each of diced carrots and onions and cook slowly until perfectly tender. Remove the calf's head and continue to boil the stock until it is reduced to a little more than a quart. Strain and add one-fourth cup of butter blended with one-half cup of browned flour. Add two cups of brown stock and the cheeks of the calf cut in dice. Royal custard cut in dice, or egg-balls may be used as preferred. Just before serving add juice of one-half lemon, a glassful of Madeira wine and pepper and salt to taste.
A full-dress Victorian mock turtle, built on a calf's head rather than any turtle at all. The technique is sound; the shopping is the hard part.
- The calf's headWhole split calf's heads are now a special order from a halal, kosher or old-style butcher, usually with the brains and tongue removed. Ask for it split and scalded. Roughly 2 lb of veal cheeks plus a split veal knuckle or two veal trotters gives you the same gelatin and the same diced meat, and is far easier to fit in a pot.
- Cooking time"Cook slowly until perfectly tender" means a bare simmer for 2 1/2 to 3 hours for a head, about 2 hours for cheeks. A rolling boil clouds the stock and toughens the cheek meat.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a heavy pan or a 350F oven until it is the color of cinnamon. It thickens perhaps half as well as raw flour, which is why the proportion here looks generous. Brown it before you need it and let it cool.
- Brown stockBrown stock generally means bones browned before simmering; any good unsalted beef stock stands in. The two cups reinforce the calf's-head broth rather than replacing it, though at roughly a third of the finished liquid it is not a trivial addition.
- ReductionThree quarts down to "a little more than a quart" is a long uncovered reduction, an hour or more. Do it after the meat comes out or the cheeks will fall to threads.
- Royal custardA savory baked custard of egg and stock, set in a shallow pan, chilled and cut in small dice as a garnish. Egg-balls are hard-boiled yolks mashed with raw yolk, rolled small and poached. Either can be made a day ahead.
- A glassful of MadeiraAn imprecise measure even then; a wine glass of the period ran about 2 to 4 fl oz. Start with 1/4 cup and taste. It goes in off the heat so the wine does not cook flat.
- Seasoning orderAdd the lemon juice last and in small amounts. It sharpens the whole pot quickly, and the acid will thin a flour-bound soup if overdone.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts of finished soup, which is six modest first-course servings.
Mock turtle was an economy dish that outlived the thing it imitated. Real turtle soup, made from imported green sea turtle, was the grandest and most expensive soup on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American tables; the mock version, generally traced to mid-eighteenth-century England, used a calf's head because its gelatinous skin and cheek meat gave the same unctuous, slightly glutinous texture and the same range of pale and dark pieces in the bowl. The Madeira, the browned flour and the lemon are all borrowed straight from turtle soup recipes of the period, as is the egg garnish, which is often said to stand in for the turtle's eggs. By the time the Butterick book appeared, mock turtle had become a set piece in its own right, and it is a fair index of how much butchery a home cook was still expected to handle: the recipe assumes without comment that a whole calf's head will arrive in the kitchen and that someone there knows what to do with it.