Picture yourself stepping into a grand Victorian dining room, candlelight flickering off crystal glasses and fine china. The air smells of spices and roasted meat. Everything looks elegant. Then you realize what’s actually on the table.
While we often romanticize Victorian dinner parties as refined affairs with tea and cakes, the reality was far more unsettling. Even a modest dinner for six diners typically contained at least 13 courses and dessert, and many of those courses featured dishes that would send modern guests running for the door. Here’s the thing. What Victorians considered delicacies often involved every possible part of an animal, from eyeballs to brains, served in ways that make even adventurous eaters squirm today.
Mock Turtle Soup Made from Cow’s Head
Turtle soup gained popularity in England in the 1750s but declined rapidly about 150 years later from overfishing, and from 1761 to 1825, it was never absent from the London Lord Mayor’s Day Banquet. Real turtle soup became so expensive and rare that Isabella Beeton noted in 1861 that it was “the most expensive soup brought to the table,” leading to mock turtle soup made from calf’s head being widely adopted.
The mock version required Victorian cooks to source a cow’s head from their butcher. According to one published recipe, you needed to scald the head until all the hair was gone, then boil it until the horns turn soft. Once you cut it into finger-sized slices, you’d simmer everything with stock, seasonings, Madeira wine, and chopped brains formed into balls. The end result was a thick, murky soup with floating brain balls bobbing about.
The huge turtle bodies were made up of different cuts of meat tasting of veal, beef, fish, ham and pork, which explained their appeal. Mock turtle soup tried to replicate this with cheaper ingredients. Recipes varied, containing beef, ham, oysters, vegetables, skin, tongue and brain in an attempt to replicate the diverse tastes and textures of turtle meat. It became such a cultural fixture that Lewis Carroll featured a Mock Turtle character in Alice in Wonderland, knowing every Victorian reader would instantly get the reference.
Jellied Eels in Their Own Gelatin
Jellied eels originated in the 18th century, primarily in the East End of London, consisting of chopped eels boiled in a spiced stock that is allowed to cool and set, forming a jelly, and it is usually served cold. Eels were once so common in the Thames that nets were set as far upriver as London itself, making them a staple for London’s poor.
The preparation sounds simple but the result is viscerally strange to modern sensibilities. The eels are chopped into rounds and boiled in water and vinegar with nutmeg and lemon juice, with the cooking process releasing proteins like collagen into the liquid, which solidify upon cooling to form a jelly. No artificial gelatin is added. The eels create their own aspic from the collagen in their skin and bones.
Working-class Londoners would buy these cold from street carts, often adding a splash of vinegar or a pat of butter if they could afford it. The dish was nutritious, cheap, and filling. However, it also had a distinctly gelatinous, wobbly texture with visible chunks of eel, complete with tiny bones that had been softened through boiling.
Eels from the Thames were boiled in a stock made with different herbs, then the concoction was cooled and the eels would jellify in their own gelatin, with some customers eating theirs with a splash of vinegar. The oldest surviving eel shop, M.Manze, has been open since 1902, and at the end of the Second World War, there were around 100 such houses in London, dropping to 87 by 1995. Today the dish is rare, though some traditional shops still serve it to adventurous tourists and nostalgic locals.
Soused Pig’s Face with Mustard
Soused pig’s face was made from a pig’s head boiled in a pot with calves’ feet and rubbed with salt before brining, often served with a dollop of mustard, and for an extra special treat, it was customary to remove the face from the bone, cover it with jelly and serve it as a delicacy. This dish perfectly captured the Victorian approach to food. Nothing was wasted, and what we might consider grotesque was simply practical cookery.
The pig’s head would stare at you during preparation. Cooks boiled it for hours until the meat became tender enough to fall from the bones. The cooking liquid, enriched with gelatin from the calves’ feet, would be strained and flavored with lemon or lime, pepper, and cayenne. The snout, ears, eyes, and grinning jaw were all served together, pickled and cold.
This pig’s head was boiled for hours with cow’s heels and rubbed with salt before being brined for several days, with the brine flavored with lemon or lime, pepper, and a touch of cayenne, and the dish of snout, ears, eyes, grinning jaw was served with mustard and vinegar. For a more refined presentation, the meat might be removed from the skull, chopped, and set in a mold with the cooking jelly poured over. This created something similar to headcheese, but with unmistakably porcine origins.
The dish remained popular throughout the Victorian era among all classes. Wealthy families served it as part of elaborate cold buffets, while working families relied on it as an affordable source of protein.
Real Turtle Soup (When They Could Get It)
Before mock turtle soup became necessary, wealthy Victorians feasted on the real thing. As many as 15,000 turtles were shipped live to Britain from the West Indies, where turtles became viewed as a fashionable and exotic delicacy ranking alongside caviar, though the green turtle population plummeted and its cost rose correspondingly. At special dinners, turtle soup might grace the menu, usually made with sun-dried turtle meat, as fresh turtle was hard to come by.
The preparation was elaborate and disturbing. According to one cookbook, beheading or throat-slitting were the preferred methods, remembering to retain the blood to add extra flavor to the soup, then the fins were removed, the calipee cut off, and the meat, bones, and entrails removed from the back shell, except for the green fat known as the monsieur, which was baked onto the shell from which the soup was served.
Turtle soup became such a status symbol that political satirists mocked wealthy people for their obsession with it. The mania for turtle meat resulted in near-extinction of green turtles in their native habitats. Ironically, this made the soup even more prestigious, as only the super-wealthy could afford increasingly rare shipments of live turtles.
Samuel Birch is credited with being the first to serve turtle soup in London, spicing it with lemons and cayennes, and it quickly became immensely popular. The soup had a dull-green color and a gelatinous texture that Victorian palates found exquisite. Special turtle-shaped tureens were designed specifically for its presentation at formal dinners, emphasizing how central this dish was to elite dining culture.
Calf’s Brains Jelly for Invalids
Considered the proper food for invalids, this aspic-type dish was prepared with a calf’s head and calves feet boiled a long time and strained, with the cooked calf’s brains added, and the jelly clarified and strained again into a mold or bowl and cooled, resulting in an unappetizing, grayish jelly that was supposed to be congealed enough to slice. Victorian medical thinking held that gelatin-based dishes were easily digestible and nourishing for the sick or weak.
The preparation required patience and a strong stomach. After hours of boiling, the cook would strain out all solid material except the brains. These were mashed and stirred into the liquid before it was clarified, sometimes with egg whites, to make it clearer. The mixture was then poured into molds to set overnight.
As a treat, you might arrange the brains and a few boiled egg slices on the bottom of the mold before pouring in the jelly, and this was not unlike head cheese, except the dish contained little actual meat. The result was a quivering, translucent gray mass that was supposed to tempt the appetite of bedridden patients. One can only imagine the reaction of a modern hospital patient being served such a dish.
This aspic was recommended for anyone recovering from illness, weakness, or surgery. Victorian medical texts praised its nutritional properties without acknowledging that the sight of it might make healthy people lose their appetite entirely. The gray color, the visible brain matter, and the wobbly texture combined to create something that looks more like a prop from a horror film than a healing food.
