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 or Calf's-Head Soup
Lay one large calf's head well cleaned and washed, and four pig's feet, in bottom of a large pot, and cover with a gallon of water; boil three hours, or until flesh will slip from bones; take out head, leaving the feet to be boiled steadily while the meat is cut from the head; select with care enough of the fatty portions in the top of the head and the cheeks to fill a tea-cup, and set aside to cool; remove brains to a saucer, and also set aside; chop the rest of the meat with the tongue very fine, season with salt, pepper, powdered marjoram and thyme, a teaspoon of cloves, one of mace, half as much allspice and a grated nutmeg. When the flesh falls from the bones of the feet, take out bones, leaving the gelatinous meat; boil all together slowly, without removing the cover, for two hours more; take the soup from the fire and set it away until the next day. An hour before dinner set the stock over the fire, and when it boils strain carefully and drop in the meat reserved, which should have been cut, when cold, into small squares. Have these all ready as well as the force-meat balls, to prepare which rub the yolks of five hard-boiled eggs to a paste in a wedgewood mortar, or in a bowl with the back of a silver spoon, adding gradually the brains to moisten them, also a little butter and salt. Mix with these, two eggs beaten very light, flour the hands and make this paste into balls about the size of a pigeon's egg: throw them into the soup five minutes before taking it from the fire; stir in a large tablespoon browned flour rubbed smooth in a little cold water, and finish the seasoning by the addition of a glass and a half of sherry or Maderia wine, and the juice of a lemon. It should not boil more than half an hour on the second day. Serve with sliced lemons.
This is a nineteenth-century household soup built on parts of the animal that are no longer sold, and one that carries a specific and untreatable disease risk. The notes below explain why it belongs on the page as a document rather than as a set of instructions.
- The brains are the problemThe forcemeat balls are bound with calf's brains, taken from the head after it has boiled, mashed into hard-boiled egg yolk and two raw beaten eggs. Bovine brain and spinal cord are the tissues that carry the BSE agent, and the resulting variant CJD in humans is fatal and untreatable. Ordinary cooking does not destroy a prion.
- Specified risk material is not foodSince the BSE controls of the 1990s, brain, spinal cord, skull and certain other tissues from cattle over a set age have been classed as specified risk material in the UK, EU and elsewhere, and are excluded from the food chain. Because those thresholds are tied to the animal's age, availability varies by jurisdiction, but a whole calf's head with the brains intact is difficult or impossible to buy in many places.
- The balls are barely cookedEven setting prions aside, the forcemeat is dropped into the soup only five minutes before it comes off the fire. Brain and raw beaten egg poached for a few minutes in a large pot of liquid is not a reliable kill step for ordinary pathogens either.
- Two days at room temperatureLeft overnight at an unspecified temperature -- The stock is boiled, then "set away until the next day" with no mention of chilling, and gelatinous head-and-trotter broth is close to an ideal growth medium. The instruction as printed gives no temperature and no time limit.
- Why the recipe is this longThe elaborate spicing — cloves, mace, allspice, nutmeg, marjoram, thyme, sherry, lemon — exists to imitate green turtle, and the pig's feet are there chiefly for gelatine, to give the broth the clinging body real turtle provided. The technique is interesting; the ingredient list is not repeatable.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe. Modern mock turtle soups are built on beef shin, oxtail or shank with the same spice and Madeira profile, and they omit brains entirely.
Mock turtle soup was invented to stand in for the real thing. Green sea turtle soup was a luxury of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American tables, expensive and hard to get inland, and cooks learned to counterfeit its gelatinous body and heavy spicing with a calf's head, whose skin, cheek fat and tongue give a similar melting texture once long-boiled. The name is straightforward once you see the logic: the pig's feet supply gelatine, the cloves, mace, nutmeg and Madeira supply the expected flavour, and the diced cheek meat stands in for the pieces of green turtle fat that were the point of the original. Its appearance in The Dixie Cook Book — one of the large late-century American compilations aimed at the ordinary Southern household — shows how thoroughly a dish of wealthy, civic and tavern dining had migrated downward: by the 1880s the imitation was a respectable dinner-party soup in its own right. It is also a frank record of nose-to-tail economy, in which a head and four trotters, cheap cuts by any measure, were turned into two days of work and a formal first course.