To dress a Calve's Head (Turtle fashion)

Origin: Hartford, Connecticut

Source: Amelia Simmons, 1796

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. Mock turtle was the deliberate imitation, using calf's head and organ meats to stand in for the real thing, and it can be dated closely in the English record. Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery carries only the genuine turtle, dressed the West India way, through its editions of 1747, 1751 and 1755. A receipt for mock turtle first appears in the appendix to the 1758 edition, and it opens by telling the cook to take a calf's head and scald off the hair as she would a pig's. Simmons, writing in Hartford nearly forty years later, prints both the feast and its stand-in a few pages apart.

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.

What we could not establish is the trade behind the fashion. The dates an earlier version of this note carried — that green sea turtle began arriving in England from the West Indies in the 1740s, that as many as fifteen thousand were shipped live, and that turtle soup was never absent from a London civic banquet between 1761 and 1825 — we learned from popular reference and food-writing sources, and we were unable to locate the evidence they rest on.

Ingredients

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.

View on Foodymology