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.

No. 354

Mock Turtle or Calf's Head, Clear Soup

Soupe Fausse Tortue ou Tete de Veau au Clair

Bone a calf's head the same as described for plain calf's head (No. 1519); put it into cold water in a saucepan on the fire, boil up the liquid and let it continue boiling for half an hour, then drain, refresh and singe it. Butter the bottom of a saucepan, cover it with slices of ham, a carrot and some onions, a bunch of parsley garnished with sage, chives, thyme and bay leaf. Split the bones taken from the head, lay them on this bed of vegetables and add two pounds of knuckle of veal, and a pound and a half of chicken, or else some chicken thighs, either of these being partially roasted; moisten with a quart of water, and let boil on a moderate fire until the liquid is reduced and fallen to a glaze, and the vegetables slightly colored. Moisten again with six quarts or either broth or water, add the blanched calf's head, boil up the liquid again, then skim and throw in one onion with a clove in it, a little mace and a quarter of a pound of mushroom trimmings; continue to boil slowly and when the head is cooked, remove it from the stock; cover it over with broth, and leave it till cold. Now cut away the white skin near the snout, divide the meat into equal sized half inch square pieces, taking only the coetaneous parts. Remove the chicken when done, season the stock, skim off the fat and strain it through a sieve, clarify it with two pounds of chopped beef and one whole egg, proceeding the same as for a consomme. Strain the liquid through a napkin or a silk sieve, and thicken it with a spoonful of fecula for each quart, diluting the fecula with half a gill of sherry and a little water, and then pouring it into the soup, stirring it vigorously until all is well mixed, then return it to the fire and stir again until it boils. Pound the meat from the chickens free of all fat, bones and skin, add to them when well pounded, four hard boiled egg-yolks, salt, nutmeg and four raw egg-yolks, rubbing all through a sieve, mix in some chopped parsley and with this preparation make some small half inch diameter quenelles; poach them in boiling and salted water, drain and put them into a saucepan with the pieces of calf's head, moisten with the stock, boil and skim, then add half a gill of Madeira or extra sherry wine for each quart of soup, and the juice of half a lemon for each quart; pour it into a soup tureen and serve very hot.

← No. 353 Green Turtle Soup, Clear a la Royal or Thick Soups & Broths No. 355 Mock Turtle Soup, Thickened →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's mock turtle is really three preparations stacked: a rich veal-and-chicken stock, a clarification, and a garnish of diced head meat with chicken quenelles. Read it through before starting, and plan on two days.

The hinge: clarify before you thickenThe whole point of the dish is a soup that is bound with starch yet still transparent. Clarify with the beef and egg first, strain through cloth, and only then whisk in the fecula. Starch added before clarification will trap the raft's debris and cloud the soup permanently.
Sourcing the headA whole calf's head must be ordered from a butcher, and in many places it now comes split and skinned. Skinned heads work but give less of the gelatinous "cutaneous" meat the recipe wants for the dice; a pound or two of veal cheek or blanched pig's trotter makes up the body if needed.
Fecula and gillsFecula is potato starch. A gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 4 tablespoons; slake one tablespoon of starch per quart in the sherry plus a little cold water before it goes near the hot soup.
Six quarts is the working volumeThe initial quart of water is meant to cook down to a glaze on the vegetables and ham, which is where the color comes from. The six quarts added afterwards reduce further during the long simmer, so expect roughly four to five quarts of finished soup, enough for sixteen to twenty servings.
Mushroom trimmingsA quarter pound of stems and peelings, the kind of trimming a nineteenth-century kitchen would have had on hand. Whole cremini stems or dried mushrooms, used sparingly, do the same job.
Cooking timesThe head needs two to three hours of slow simmering to become tender; the chicken should be pulled out when done, after forty-five minutes or so, before it falls apart into the stock, since its flesh is wanted for the quenelles.
The quenellesPounding cooked chicken with hard yolks and raw yolks predates the food processor. A processor does it in seconds, but the sieving step is not optional if you want the smooth texture. Poach a test quenelle first: too loose and it disintegrates, in which case work in another raw yolk.
Wine and lemon go in lastMadeira or sherry and lemon juice are added off the main boil, per quart, at the end. Cooked long they turn flat and sour; added at service they are much of what distinguishes the soup from a plain veal broth.

A Little History

Mock turtle soup was made to imitate the green turtle soup that stood at the top of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century banquet menus, when live turtles were shipped from the Caribbean at enormous expense. A calf's head supplies a similar combination of gelatinous skin and lean meat to that of real turtle, and the Madeira, mace and lemon echo the turtle recipe. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for more than thirty years, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a record of that kitchen's repertoire; he gives the mock version its own numbered entry immediately after the genuine article (No. 353) and before a thickened mock turtle (No. 355). The dish faded in the twentieth century along with the habit of buying whole heads, though a spiced, sweetened descendant survives around Cincinnati and in the English packet-soup tradition.