Our new book SIMMER is coming out in October, but to whet your soup-excitement you’ve got THREE RECIPES to play with this week…and a further three next week. OK: our very nice publisher actually said that they didn’t have space to include these two. We had a lot of fun to experiment with these – please let us know what you think…
“In as much as this tome is meant to be a compendium of the world’s soups (as well as some interesting soupnovations), we have endeavoured only to include those that are relatively doable in a 21st century kitchen. But there are a few soups which are legendary…but also which no-one makes anymore. Having said that, none of the below are unachievable: they will just take a little more preparation…
Mock Turtle Soup
To serve 6-8
The sign said: “The Green Turtle, Chelonia mydas, is the source of turtle soup … ” I am the source of William G. soup if it comes to that. Everyone is the source of his or her kind of soup. In a town as big as London that’s a lot of soup walking around. From Russell Hoban’s Turtle Diary (one of the best books ever written, fact)
We are all familiar with the sorrowful creature in Alice in Wonderland – the Mock Turtle who longs for his previous incarnation as a full-on chelonian rather than the half cow, half turtle which we see in the book. The thing is, Lewis Carroll was on point with his satire here, as mock turtle soup is indeed made with a cow’s head.
Story was, back in the (Hanoverian and) Victorian day, turtle meat from the West Indies had become very popular with the British nobility. And supply was failing to meet demand. Also an appetite for the soup which was made therein was spreading to the less well financially endowed masses. SO the recipe ‘evolved’: no longer was it made with turtle meat, but rather with ‘mock turtle’, which could refer to all manner of meaty cuts but in practice refers to a calf’s head. It remained a favourite with the public until the mid 20th century (Campbells even canned it).
Ingredients:
1 calf’s head, skinned and halved, brain removed (but you want the brain, keep the brain)
1 tablespoon vinegar
oil + butter for frying (authentically, lard)
2 onions, peeled and chopped
4 cloves garlic (inauthentic extra)
about 600g beef neck or shin, cut into small cubes
1 bag bouquet garni (see p000)
4 bay leaves
1 teaspoon salt
8-10 peppercorns
1 smoked ham hock
2 sticks celery, chopped
2 carrots, peeled and chopped
½ nutmeg, grated
½ teaspoon ground turmeric (inauthentic extra)
1 cinnamon quill
1 sherry glass of Madeira (or sherry)
30g (roughly) beurre manie*
for the forcemeat balls:
3 rashers streaky bacon, minced
75g suet
75g breadcrumbs
2 eggs
½ teaspoon ground allspice
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon ground black pepper
handful English parsley, chopped
flour + oil for frying
lemon juice + lemon wedges for serving
Wash the calf’s head (minus the brain) well, and soak it in cold water with a splash of vinegar for about twenty minutes. Then change the water, place it in a big saucepan (make sure it is well covered with the fresh water) and bring it to the boil; simmer for about two hours, skimming off any scum that arises.
In the meantime, wash, skin and slice the reserved brain and soak it in cold water.
Heat a little oil/butter in a pan and fry off the onions and garlic, before adding the cubed beef. Turn it over in the fat to seal it, and then add the contents of the pan – along with the herbs, salt, pepper, ham, vegetables and spices – to the pan containing the calf’s head. Cook on a low heat for about four hours (traditionally this would have been left cooking on a range overnight), keeping an eye on the liquid levels, before straining the stock. Throw away anything you don’t want to keep (traditionally all the veg plus the bouquet garni and cinnamon stick, but I would keep the veg), strim the all meat from all the bones and shred the tongue, and then put all the stuff you do want to keep back in the pan with the stock. Bring back to a gentle simmer, and then add the Madeira and whisk in the beurre manie.
To make the forcemeat balls, throw all of the ingredients apart from the flour and oil together, mixing well with your hands: then roll them into walnut size balls. Heat some oil in a pan, roll the meatballs in flour, and fry so that they are slightly browned all over.
Bring a separate pan of water to the boil, and ‘blanch’ the brain slices for about fifteen minutes before draining them. Season some flour with turmeric and salt, and coat the brain slices with the mixture before frying them in butter until quite crispy.
Check the seasoning of the soup and serve with the forcemeat balls and brain ‘croutons’. Lemon wedges de rigeur. To be honest you’ll probably need the rest of that bottle of Madeira to wash it down.
*beurre manie is actually a classic way of thickening a soup by pressing equal amounts of
butter and flour together and whisking it into sauces to thicken them. Tbh, it is one of those things that you learn at chef-skool and then never actually use.
Soup No 5 (aka bulls ‘bits’ soup)
Serves 2
Cooking with animal testes and other bits from the nether regions has a long history. There is no reason why, if you’re eating an animal, you shouldn’t eat all of the animal – nose to tail eating and all that.
China has a tiger penis soup, and in Canada ‘prairie oysters’ are actually battered and fried bulls testicles. But this particular recipe is from the Philippines, where genital meat is widely held to be an aphrodisiac and to boost the male libido.* It is also meant to be a good hangover remedy, although whether you could stomach cleaning off lots of bull bits with a raging hangover is questionable.
Ingredients:
about 350g bull testicles/penis
2 sticks lemon grass
1 small piece oxtail (about 300g) cut into two rounds
1 onions, quartered
2 cloves garlic, crushed
oil for frying
3 cm ginger, peeled and finely sliced
6-7 spring onions, finely chopped
1 carrot, peeled and finely sliced
1-2 birds eye chillies, chopped
small handful Thai (holy) basil, shredded
small handful fresh coriander, shredded
fish sauce (patis is the Philippine version) to taste
salt to taste
‘spiced vinegar’ (rice vinegar will do) to serve
Wash the bull meat and cut it into chunks/rings. Bring a pan of water to the boil and blanch the meat for five minutes before draining, rinsing and repeating. You are meant to do this three times, chiefly to get rid of the smell, before placing the testes in a fourth pan of water with the lemon grass and simmering it for about two hours. At the end of the time drain the water and reserve the cubed meat.
Put the oxtail in a different pan with about 600ml water, the onion and crushed garlic, and bring that too to the boil. You should also simmer this for two hours. After that time discard the onion and crushed garlic, but add the boiled bull bits to the pan.
Heat some oil in a frying pan and cook the ginger, spring onion, carrot and chillies. Once they have softened, add the herbs and tip the contents of the pan into the master stock post with the meat. Simmer for another hour, and then add fish sauce and salt to taste.
Serve with vinegar on the side.
*which is why we have written this recipe for two people as it seems counterintuitive to write an aphrodisiac recipe for more. Unless…oh.
Brown Windsor Soup
Serves 4
This was a British menu staple at one stage (oft associated with cheap boarding houses and cafes), but was relegated during the last decades of the last century to become the butt of comedians’ jokes. It is a bit of mystery how the soup was first created: it is commonly associated with Queen Victoria, but there is no mention of brown Windsor soup in cookery annals until WWII. Windsor Soup was a white soup which did the rounds at the end of the 19th century. And Brown Windsor was actually a soap. Confused, much.
Anyway, this is as close as I can get to an authentic replication of something that may or may not have existed. And starts as a casserole but turns into a soup.
Ingredients:
250g diced stewing beef (chuck steak or shin)
1 tablespoon beef dripping (OR use butter and oil mixed)
2 leeks, chopped
2 carrots, peeled and sliced
1 bouquet garni (thyme, bay leaves, peppercorns work best)
1 teaspoon grated horseradish (or just use jarred stuff)
1 marrow bone, cut into 4 (get the butcher to do it)
1.2lt good beef stock (see p000)
1 glass port
salt and ground white pepper to taste
Seal the beef cubes in the dripping, and then add the leeks and carrots, mixing well. Next the herbs and horseradish go into the pan, followed by the bone marrow, stock and port. Bring the contents of the pan to the boil, and then simmer for about two and a half hours, keeping an eye on the liquid level.
At the end of this time, discard the bouquet garni and the bone (although you should make sure all of the marrow gets scraped back into the soup) and blend the soup. Purists would probably then also push it though a sieve, but there really is no need. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Serve with bread and butter. And maybe some Marmite.”
SO NOW YOU KNOW! You’ve got a week to try out these three…there are actually three more to play with next week. Happy old, strange (via Persepolis) cookery things ;)