THIS week’s Quaker Cookbook recipe comes from the kitchen of Rachel Pease, the wife of Edward “Father of the Railways”

Pease, who lived and dined in his splendid mansion in Northgate, Darlington, which is now a pizza parlour and kebab takeaway shop.

Our recipe comes from a Quaker cookbook, containing 19th Century Pease family recipes, that has been kindly lent to us by Rachael Oliver, of Gainford.

In the great days of the British Empire, new, exotic tastes were found in foreign countries. There was no more tastebud-tickling find than Turtle Soup, which came from the mysterious, distant Orient.

What a culinary wonder was the green or snapping turtle – chefs reckoned it had seven different types of meat hidden beneath its shell.

Therefore, the soup – more of a stew, really – at one mouthful tasted of pork or chicken, the next it tasted of beef or shrimp, and the next it tasted of veal or fish or goat.

However, because you could not get many fresh turtles on Darlington market, this soup was a delicacy enjoyed only by the very rich.

Those further down the social scale had to make do with Mock Turtle Soup. This was made out of the bits of a cow that are usually regarded as indigestible – hooves, ears, brains, tail.

In light of this information, as the Quaker recipe contains “forced meat balls”, we shudder to think what was going into it.

Most Mock Turtle Soup was given the delightful fishy flavour of real turtle soup by the addition of a few chopped up oysters.

The Darlington Quakers, perhaps wisely, do not mix any fish into their Mock Turtle, although they do seem to make a presentational feature of the cow’s ears:

Mock Turtle Take a fine calf’s head with the skin on and scald the hair off and then boil it till a straw will pierce the skin. Cut it into square pieces and slice the Ears thin. Stew it well with strong gravy, having season’d it with Nutmeg, Mace Chyan, the juice of half-a-lemon. Add forced meat balls, boil’d Eggs, Truffles and Morells, and a little catchup. The sliced ears should be laid at the top of the dish. If Wine is agreeable, less than a gill of White Port may be added.

OF course, the most famous of all Mock Turtles is the one that appears in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. As drawn by John Tenniel, the Mock Turtle features a cow’s head, back legs and tail – a reference to the soup.

The Northern Echo: SINGING FOR SUPPER: John Tenniel’s illustration of the Mock Turtle for Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland
John Tenniel’s illustration of the Mock Turtle for Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll lived at Croft-on-Tees, where his father was rector, in the 1840s and 1850s. Could the culinary tastes of the Darlington Quakers have inspired his character?