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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April 21
Menu: Mock Turtle Soup; Beef, a la Mode Potatoes; Cauliflower Beet Salad; Rhubarb Shortcake; Cheese Wafers; Coffee Mock Turtle Soup-1/2 calf's head, 2 pounds shin beef, small knuckle veal, 3 tablespoons Crisco, 1/2 cup flour, 1 ounce ham, large bunch herbs, 12 whole peppers, 6 cloves, blade mace, 3 onions, 1 carrot, 1/2 head celery, 1 leek, glass sherry or some lemon juice, salt and red pepper to taste, and quenelles. Leave head in water to soak for 5 or 6 hours; then wash well and take out brains. Bone head. Cut 6 ounces lean part of veal and reserve to make quenelles. Then chop bones taken from head, the veal, and beef. Put them into stockpot, and place flesh from head on top; then well cover with water, add little salt and let slowly come to boil. Skim well; add vegetables, cleaned but not cut up, and spices. Let all simmer very slowly for 8 or 9 hours. When head is quite tender (it will take about four hours), lift it out carefully and place between 2 dishes to press until quite cold. Strain stock. Melt Crisco in pan, add ham cut into small pieces, and fry slowly for five minutes, then add flour and stir until it is of dark brown color. Take off stove and add stock by degrees; stir over fire until it boils; put it at corner of stove to simmer for 20 minutes; skim and strain it. Cut head into small square pieces and warm up in soup; add sherry, red pepper, and salt to taste. Turn it out into tureen, then put in some very small quenelles, made with teaspoons, and poached for 10 minutes in water.
This is a genuine period recipe, but it is built on a cut of meat that food safety authorities in the United States, Canada, the EU and the UK now treat as regulated specified risk material. The notes below explain what in the recipe cannot be reproduced, not how to reproduce it.
- The calf's head is the problemA bovine head carries brain, skull, trigeminal ganglia and the top of the spinal cord — the tissues in which the BSE prion concentrates. The recipe has the cook soak the half head, take out the brains by hand, bone it, and boil the chopped head bones for eight or nine hours: direct handling of exactly the material that later regulation exists to keep out of the food chain.
- Removing the brains does not remove the riskThe instruction "take out brains" was almost certainly a culinary step rather than a safety measure — period cooks commonly dressed brains separately. Prions are not destroyed by long simmering, and the eight- or nine-hour stock is drawn off the chopped head bones themselves, so discarding the brain tissue does not make the resulting stock equivalent to an ordinary veal stock.
- Age of the animal is not specified and cannot be inferredModern rules distinguish cattle by age precisely because risk material designation depends on it, and the original gives no age, provenance or inspection status. There is no way to read a safe animal back into a 1913 instruction that assumes the local butcher split the head for you.
- Supply has caught up with the regulationWhole or half bovine heads with the skull intact are hard to find at retail across much of the English-speaking world, and head meat sold under inspection has generally been trimmed to exclude these tissues. Sourcing the recipe as written would be difficult even setting the hazard aside.
- If you want mock turtle soupUse a current recipe. Modern versions are usually built from veal shin, oxtail or trimmed veal cheek rather than a head.
Mock turtle soup was an eighteenth-century economy: real green turtle soup was a luxury imported from the West Indies, and cooks discovered that a long-simmered calf's head gave a similar gelatinous, faintly gluey body and the same mixture of soft and firm textures in the bowl — hence "mock." By the Victorian period it had become a set piece of the respectable dinner table on both sides of the Atlantic, thickened with a dark brown roux, spiked with sherry and cayenne, and garnished with quenelles, the small poached forcemeat dumplings shaped between two teaspoons that appear at the end here. Its presence in The Story of Crisco (1913) is telling: the book's "Calendar of Dinners" was written to prove that Procter & Gamble's new hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter and lard anywhere a cook might use them, so even a soup this old-fashioned gets three tablespoons of Crisco for its roux. The dish faded from most American menus over the twentieth century as tastes moved away from offal and head meats, though it persisted regionally — notably in canned form in Cincinnati — and is still made from non-head cuts.