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 Soup
Let your butcher prepare a calf's head. Take off all the flesh, take out the tongue whole and take out the brains whole. The brains may be saved for a separate dish.
Soak all separately for a few moments in salt and water. Cut the skull all to pieces, wash it quickly, and put it on the fire in four quarts of cold water, together with the flesh, tongue, half a bunch of parsley, half a stalk of celery, one large bay leaf, three cloves, half an inch of a stick of cinnamon, three whole allspice, six pepper-corns, half of a carrot and one small turnip. When the tongue is tender, take it out (to be served as a separate dish with spinach or with sauce tartare.) Leave in the flesh for about two hours when it will be perfectly tender. Let the bones, etc., simmer for six hours, then strain and put away until the next day. At the same time that the calf's head is cooking in one vessel, make a stock in another, with a beef soup bone (two pounds), boil a chicken for salad in the stock, remove chicken when tender, put in two quarts of water and simmer until reduced to a pint. The next day, remove the fat and settlings from the two stocks. Put into a two-quart stew pan two tablespoonfuls of butter, and when it bubbles stir in an ounce of ham cut in strips, and one heaping tablespoonful of flour. Stir it constantly until it gets quite brown, pour the reduced stock over it, mix it well, and strain it. Now to a half pound of the calf's head cut in dice add one quart of the calf's head stock boiling hot, and a pint of reduced and thickened stock, the juice of half a lemon, and one glassful of sherry. When it is about to boil set it to one side and skim it very carefully; add two hard boiled eggs cut in dice, and salt; or egg balls, If, instead of the egg dice, egg balls should be preferred, add to the yolks of two hard boiled eggs the raw yolk of one egg, one tablespoonful of melted butter, a little salt and pepper, and enough sifted flour to make it consistent enough to handle. Sprinkle flour on the board, roll it out about half an inch thick, cut it into dice, and roll each one into little balls in the palm of the hand. Put these into the soup five minutes before it is served. It is very nice to add, instead of egg balls, whole yolks of hard boiled eggs, one for each plate.
This is a genuine recipe, but its foundation is bovine central nervous tissue and skull, and that places it outside what can be cooked today. The points below explain where the specific hazard lies rather than how to work around it.
- The brain and skull are the problemThe recipe has you remove the brains whole and then break up and simmer the skull itself. Brain, skull and spinal cord from cattle are among the tissues regulators designate specified risk material -- in the EU for animals over twelve months, in the United States for those over thirty -- because the BSE agent concentrates there. Nothing in the six-hour simmer inactivates it, since the prion responsible is not destroyed by ordinary cooking temperatures.
- Why heat does not helpBSE is not caused by a bacterium or a virus but by a misfolded protein that survives boiling, autoclaving in ordinary conditions, and long stock reduction. There is no time or temperature in a domestic kitchen that makes this stock safe, which is why no adjusted method is offered here.
- The disease it causesConsumption of infected bovine nervous tissue is linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. It is progressive, untreatable and fatal, with an incubation period that can run to years or decades. The risk from any single portion is low, but it is not a risk that can be managed by technique.
- You cannot buy the ingredient anywayYou cannot readily buy the ingredient anyway -- Since the BSE controls of the 1990s, bovine skull and brain have been removed from the human food chain in the EU and the UK and restricted in the United States and many other jurisdictions, though the US ban applies to cattle over thirty months and brain from younger animals remains legal if uncommon. In most places a butcher will not supply a split head with the brain in place, in the sense this recipe means.
- The rest of the method is not a rescueThe brown roux with ham, the reduced beef-and-chicken stock, the sherry and lemon, the egg balls — all of it is sound period cookery. None of it changes the fact that the defining stock comes from skull and head meat. Treating the dish as a flavour problem to be substituted around is not the same recipe, so use a current mock turtle or brown veal soup recipe instead.
- A note on scale, for reading onlyThe proportions here are a large household's: four quarts of water for the head, a separate two-pound beef bone stock with a whole chicken boiled in it, then reduced to a pint. This is two days' work in two vessels, and the finished soup amounts to roughly three pints.
Mock turtle soup existed because real turtle soup was a luxury: green sea turtle, shipped live from the Caribbean, was the grandest thing on an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century table, and cooks were expected to imitate it when it could not be had. The imitation rested on a calf's head, whose gelatinous skin and cheek meat, cut in dice and set in a dark sherried broth, gave something close to the texture of turtle fat theel as much as flavour, which is why the meat is cubed and why egg balls or whole hard-boiled yolks appear in the dish the eggs are often said to stand in for turtle eggs, though they were equally standard garnish in real turtle soup and in other soups. By the time this book was printed the soup had become a set piece of American and English formal dining, and its appearance in a general household cookbook shows how thoroughly the imitation had displaced the original. The tongue and brains being sent off as separate dishes is also characteristic: a calf's head was bought whole and nothing was wasted. Today the sea turtles are protected and calf's head is hard to come by, so the dish survives mainly in condensed-soup nostalgia and in German Mockturtlesuppe made from veal offcuts.