To dress a Calve's Head (Turtle fashion)

History

To dress a turtle, in Amelia Simmons's American Cookery, is a day-long piece of butchery. Around nine in the morning the cook hangs the turtle up by its hind fins, cuts off the head and saves the blood, then separates the callapach from the callapee — the back shell from the belly — down to the shoulders to reach and clean the entrails. The meat of the fins, back and belly is scalded, skinned and cut into pieces about the breadth of a card, then layered in deep brown-ware dishes with butter, a pounded salt-and-cayenne seasoning, dried sweet herbs, boiled turtle blood and veal forcemeat balls; a gill of Madeira goes into each dish, eggs are broken over the top to keep the meat from scorching, shredded parsley is shaken over to green it, and the whole is baked in an oven hot enough for bread. Its companion, to dress a calf's head turtle fashion, reaches for the same flavors without the turtle: the head, feet and pluck are boiled and sliced, layered with veal and a cayenne-and-sweet-herb seasoning and stewed in their own liquor; veal forcemeat balls are fried brown, the chopped brains and a pint of wine are stirred through, and it is served from tureens with lemon and hard-boiled eggs.

The two recipes are the luxury and its echo. Green sea turtle began to be widely imported to England from the West Indies about 1740–1750, and turtle became a fashionable and exotic delicacy ranking alongside caviar; as many as fifteen thousand were shipped live to Britain, and turtle soup was never absent from the London Lord Mayor's Day Banquet between 1761 and 1825. To serve it was a display of wealth. Mock turtle followed as the deliberate imitation, created in response to the overhunting that had driven the real turtle toward extinction, using calf's head and organ meats to duplicate the texture and flavor of turtle — a substitution Hannah Glasse had already printed by the 1758 edition of her Art of Cookery. That British appetite for turtle had reached the American colonies well before Simmons wrote, which is how both the genuine feast and its calf's-head stand-in came to sit a few pages apart in a Hartford cookbook.

The book prints the method and nothing of the table it was meant for: it does not say who in the new republic laid out such a dish, nor whether the households that owned this cookbook were more likely to meet a live sea turtle or, far more often, the calf's head dressed to stand in its place.

Ingredients

• 1 calf's head
• 1 spoon black pepper
• 2 spoons sweet herbs
• 1 tea spoon cayenne
• 1 pound butter
• flour
• veal
• 1 1/2 pound veal
• 1 pound grated bread
• 4 ounces raw salt pork
• 3 egg whites
• 1 pint wine
• hard boiled eggs
• lemon

Instructions

1. Open the well-scalded head and take out the brains; wash, pick, and clean them, season with salt, pepper, and parsley, and set aside in a cloth.
2. Boil the head, feet, and heartslet (pluck) for one and a quarter to one and a half hours.
3. Take out the bones, slice the skin and meat, and drain and reserve the cooking liquor.
4. Clean the pot well to prevent burning.
5. Layer the slices and dust with a composition of 1 spoon black pepper, 2 spoons pulverized sweet herbs, 1 teaspoon cayenne, and 1 pound butter, then dust with flour.
6. Add another layer of head slices with veal slices and seasoning, continuing until completed.
7. Cover with the reserved liquor and stew gently three quarters of an hour.
8. For the forcemeat balls, mince and season 1 1/2 pounds veal, 1 pound grated bread, and 4 ounces raw salt pork, work with 3 egg whites into 1 to 1 1/2 inch balls, roll in flour, and fry in very hot butter until brown.
9. Chop the brains fine and stir into the pot.
10. Add one third of the fried balls and a pint of wine or less, and heat through.
11. Serve in tureens, laying the rest of the balls and peeled hard-boiled eggs in a dish, garnished with lemon slices.