Type Soup | ||
 | ||
Main ingredients Brains and organ meats (calf's head or foot) Similar Turtle soup, Forloren hare, Medisterpølse, Labskaus, Mulligatawny | ||
Mock turtle soup with heston blumenthal
Mock turtle soup is an English soup that was created in the mid-18th century as a cheaper imitation of green turtle soup. It often uses brains and organ meats such as calf's head or a calf's foot to duplicate the texture and flavour of the original's turtle meat.
Contents
Mrs. Fowle's Mock Turtle Soup:
Take a large calf's head. Scald off the hair. Boil it until the horn is tender, then cut it into slices about the size of your finger, with as little lean as possible. Have ready three pints of good mutton or veal broth, put in it half a pint of Madeira wine, half a teaspoonful of thyme, pepper, a large onion, and the peel of a lemon chop't very small. A ¼ of a pint of oysters chop't very small, and their liquor; a little salt, the juice of two large onions, some sweet herbs, and the brains chop't. Stand all these together for about an hour, and send it up to the table with the forcemeat balls made small and the yolks of hard eggs.
Mock turtle soup
Germany
In the Oldenburg and Ammerland regions of Germany, Mockturtlesuppe—the English designation "mock turtle" retained—is a traditional meal, dating from the time of the personal union between the Kingdom of Hanover and the Kingdom of Great Britain.
US
The Campbell Soup Company once produced canned mock turtle soup made of calf's head. In a 1962 interview with David Bourdon, Andy Warhol, commenting on Campbell's discontinued soups, said that Mock Turtle had once been his favorite. An American version of the soup is popular in Cincinnati and canned under the name Worthmore's Mock Turtle Soup.
In popular culture
Mock turtle soup is the basis for the character of the Mock Turtle in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the joke being that mock turtle soup is supposedly made from these creatures.
In season 4, episode 16 of Gilmore Girls, Richard Gilmore requests turtle neck soup while in mourning in the days after the death of his mother, the eldest Lorelai Gilmore, as it was "something his mother used to have made for him when he was a little boy." Nobody knows what turtle neck soup is, so Lorelai offers her father mock turtle soup.
In season 4, episode 8 of American Horror Story, Ethel Darling (Kathy Bates) serves mock turtle soup to Elsa Mars (Jessica Lange).