Then the Queen left off, quite out of breath, and said to Alice, “Have you seen the Mock Turtle yet?”
“No,” said Alice. “I don’t even know what a Mock Turtle is.”
“It’s the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from,” said the Queen.
“I never saw one, or heard of one,” said Alice.
“Come on, then,” said the Queen, “and he shall tell you his history,”
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
L. Carroll (1865)
If you’ve ever read about Alice and her adventures, you’ll be familiar with the plight of the Mock Turtle and his endless sobs as he tells his tale of woe. Well turns out he had plenty to be crying about because back in the 1720s British sailors coming back from the West Indies had brought with them the dubious but supposedly divine recipe that is Turtle Soup.
The sailors while exploring the tropical beaches found droves of the green sea turtles (Chelonia Mydas) which can grow up to 100 pounds. Seafaring was a thankless trade in those days with journeys taking months or more likely years to complete and fresh food in very short supply. They clapped their eyes on these giant slow-moving beasts and their minds went to one thing – dinner.
They captured the turtles and kept them alive during the journey, rationing them along the way as their live catch steadily became tureens of mild green soup. When they did reach British shores, the few turtles that had survived this nightmarish journey were immediately taken into custody by the English aristocracy who promptly turned them into royal dinners of their own.
Predictably, the soup's popularity among the upper echelons of society made it seem even more tempting to those on the lower rungs. Suddenly everyone wanted a taste of Turtle Soup and at the peak of its popularity, 15,000 live turtles were being shipped in from the West Indies every year. It wasn’t easy to keep them alive and well fed on these journeys so shipping them was an expensive affair and as their numbers dwindled the merchants started seeing a steep dip in their profits.
But it wasn’t simply aspiration that made Turtle Soup so popular, it was the flavour itself. The turtle as a creature has a wide variety of organs and muscle systems that are unique to its reptilian nature. It was said that different cuts of the turtle tasted like veal, beef, fish, ham and pork and each with its own delicious texture. So the industrious people of middle-class Britain set about trying to recreate these tastes and textures from the items they had available on their own shores.
Beef, ham, oysters, vegetables, skins, tongue, brain…anything and everything was added to the pot and every recipe does it a little differently. However, the one ingredient that everyone seemed to agree on was the need for a calf’s head. A cheap and cheerful addition for most since it was never a popular item at the butcher’s counter, it contributes a lot on its own to the kaleidoscope of flavours they tried to achieve.
It was as early as 1758 that recipes for Mock Turtle Soup began to appear in cookbooks with a calf’s head as the secret ingredient to achieve the gelatinous quality. The rest of the meats, offal and vegetables were boiled down into a consomme with the calf’s head in the pot. People loved this quicker, cheaper and more accessible way to make the elusive dish and the meaty broth soon became a British classic that is still enjoyed by many today, with the turtle element only living on in the name.