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Mock Turtle Soup

A soup made from calf heads, hearts, liver, and vegetables, seasoned with lemon, Worcestershire sauce, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Mock Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the calf parts

  1. Unjoint the jaws of the calf heads and remove the brain.

  2. Clean the heads thoroughly with boiling water.

  3. Split the hearts and trim the liver.

  4. Place them in a tank with cold water.

  5. Turn on steam.

  6. Skim at the first boil. Skim again 15 minutes later.

  7. Simmer for two hours or until the meat is tender.

  8. Remove the hearts, liver, and heads from the tank.

  9. Take the meat and tongues from the heads.

Make the stock

  1. Return the bones to the kettle with the vegetables, herbs, and cloves.

  2. Cook slowly for two hours.

  3. Draw off the stock.

  4. Strain the stock into a cooling tank.

Make the soup

  1. Cut the liver into dice, slice and chop the hearts, and tear the meat into small pieces.

  2. Chop the tongues.

  3. In an iron pot, melt the butter and brown it. Add the flour and brown it as well.

  4. Skim the grease from the stock and add it to the kettle. Mix in the browned flour and bring to a boil, stirring constantly.

  5. Add the meat, tongues, hearts, and liver. Boil for two minutes.

  6. Turn off the steam. Add the juice of the lemons, Worcestershire sauce, white pepper, salt, and sherry wine.

  7. Place in cans, cap, tip, and process.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Lemon + carrottop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,351 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Lemon + turniptop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together770 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Calves' heads
Provide gelatin and rich body for the stock and meat.
Butter
Browned with the flour to build a nutty, toasted flavour and fat base.
Flour
Browned and stirred in to thicken the soup.
Sherry wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the finished soup.
Lemons
Their juice adds acidity that brightens the rich broth.
Calves' liver
Adds savoury, meaty flavour and body to the soup.

The step that matters

Stirring the browned flour into the stock. Flour thickens only when it is fully dispersed and brought to a boil; adding it to hot stock without constant stirring causes lumps and uneven thickening.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sherry, wine, sauce, liver, carrot, onion, turnip):

  1. Applefits better
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Grapefits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sherry, wine, sauce, liver, carrot, onion, turnip. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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