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Mock Turtle Soup
Mrs. C. H. Wheeler.
One soup-bone, one quart of turtle beans, one large spoonful of powdered cloves, salt and pepper. Soak the beans over night, put them on with the soup-bone in nearly six quarts of water and cook five or six hours. When half done, add the cloves, salt and pepper; when done, strain through a colander, pressing the pulp of the beans through to make the soup the desired thickness, and serve with a few slices of hard-boiled egg and lemon sliced very thin. The turtle beans are black and can only be obtained from large grocers.
This is a black bean soup dressed up as mock turtle, and it scales to a crowd. The clove measurement is the one number to treat with suspicion before anything else.
- The clovesA "large spoonful" of powdered cloves — probably something on the order of a tablespoon — is aggressive by modern palates. Start with a teaspoon, taste at the end of cooking, and add more if the soup tastes flat rather than spiced.
- Turtle beansBlack turtle beans, now sold in every supermarket as black beans. The note that they "can only be obtained from large grocers" dates the recipe more precisely than anything else in it.
- Quantities and yieldA quart of dry beans is roughly 1¾ lb, and with nearly six quarts of water this makes something like four to five quarts of finished soup after evaporation — twelve to sixteen servings. Halve everything for a normal household.
- The soup-boneA meaty beef shank or marrow bone, about 2 lb. Butchers still sell them cheaply; brown it in the pot first for a soup with more depth than the original method gives.
- Cooking timeFive or six hours suited a range that was lit anyway. Soaked black beans and a shank should be tender in roughly 2 to 2½ hours at a bare simmer on a modern burner, or well under an hour under pressure. Longer does no harm but adds nothing.
- StrainingPushing the beans through a colander with the back of a ladle is the whole texture of the dish — part purée, part broth. A food mill does it faster; a blender makes it too smooth and loses the character. Pull the bone out first and dice any meat back in.
- SaltThe recipe salts halfway through; salting then rather than at the end makes little practical difference to how the beans break down, so season the strained soup properly at the finish. The clove will read as harsh in an undersalted soup.
- ServingHard-boiled egg and paper-thin lemon are the mock-turtle costume. A spoonful of dry sherry was a common nineteenth-century addition to turtle and mock-turtle soups.
Real turtle soup, made from green sea turtle, was a luxury of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American dining, and "mock turtle" was the frugal imitation of it. The classic English mock turtle used a calf's head, whose gelatinous meat mimicked turtle; American cooks also used a thick clove-scented bean purée to much the same dark, rich effect for a fraction of the cost. The hard-boiled egg is often said to stand in for the turtle's own eggs, with which turtle soup was garnished, though this is traditional explanation rather than documented fact. Whether the beans' own name, "turtle bean", has any bearing on the dish's title is unclear. The recipe's appearance in a community cookbook, credited to a named contributor, is typical of how such books worked.