🤢 Frankly Gross 1911

Mock Turtle à la Marion Harland

Fake turtle eggs, rolled from hard-boiled yolks and the calf's own brains, into little marbles.

From: The Butterick Cook Book
Published: 1911
Yikes Scale: Big yikes

Exactly as printed, 1911

MOCK TURTLE À LA MARION HARLAND-Boil and blanch a calf's head, take out the bones and let the meat and tongue get cold in the liquor. Do not let it remain long enough to jelly. As soon as the meat is firm take it from the stock, wipe dry, and cut with the tongue into neat dice an inch long, and half as wide. Make a gravy of a large cup of the pot liquor, thickened with butter rolled in browned flour and seasoned with lemon and onion juice, a teaspoon of caramel, a little salt and paprika. Put in the meat, and simmer fifteen minutes.

Have ready a sauce made by heating a cup of cream (adding a pinch of soda) and pour it, stirring all the time, upon the beaten yolks of three eggs. Stir and beat for one minute, and add to the meat and gravy. Now add a glass of sherry and pour all into a deep dish, in which you have laid a pile of turtle eggs made by rubbing together the yolks of three hard boiled eggs and the boiled brains of the calf, binding them with a raw egg and a little browned flour. They should be made into little marbles with floured hands and cooked in boiling butter for two minutes, then fished out and drained in a colander.

The Butterick Cook Book, 1911. Public domain; transcription unaltered.

So what happens if I make it?

The marbles are made of calf brain, which is specified risk material and out of the food supply. That is the whole reason this one cannot be cooked.

The conceit is worth admiring on its own terms. Mock turtle exists because real turtle was ruinously expensive, and this recipe goes to the trouble of faking the eggs as well as the meat.

Notes from the 21st century

Mock turtle is a whole tradition. Calf's head standing in for turtle, everywhere from Victorian England to the Alice books. Fifteen separate books in our corpus print a version.
Marion Harland was a household name. The pen name of Mary Virginia Terhune, one of the most widely read American domestic writers of the century.
The sherry goes in at the end. A glass, stirred through with the cream-and-yolk liaison. Every mock turtle finishes this way, imitating the real dish's Madeira.

Also in this book

Beef Juice — Beef broiled two minutes and pressed — warm raw serum, for invalids and infants.

Don't take our word for it. The complete book is online, free and searchable.

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