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Mock Turtle Soup

A soup made from calf heads, hearts, liver, vegetables, herbs, and spices, finished with lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, and sherry.

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 heads and stock

  1. Unjoint the jaws and remove the brain.

  2. Clean thoroughly with boiling water.

  3. Split the hearts and trim the liver.

  4. Place in a tank with cold water, turn on steam, and skim at the first boil, then skim again 15 minutes later.

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

  6. Remove the hearts, liver, and heads.

  7. Take the meat and tongues from the heads.

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

  9. Cook slowly for two hours.

  10. Draw off and strain the stock into a cooling tank.

  11. Cut the liver into dice.

  12. Slice and chop the hearts.

  13. Tear the meat into small pieces.

Make the thickened soup

  1. In an iron pot, melt the butter and brown it. Add the flour and brown it further.

  2. Skim the grease from the stock.

  3. Add it to the kettle with the browned flour. Mix and bring to a boil, stirring constantly.

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

Season and can

  1. Shut off the steam.

  2. Add the juice of the lemons, Worcestershire sauce, pepper, salt, and sherry wine.

  3. 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

Flour
Browned in butter, it thickens the stock into a rich, body-filled soup.
Butter
Fat that is browned with the flour, adding nutty aroma and richness.
Calves’ heads
Provide gelatinous meat and stock body as they simmer.
Calves’ liver
Adds deep, savory flavor and a soft texture to the finished soup.
Lemons
Their juice adds acidity that brightens the rich, heavy stock.
Worcestershire sauce
Adds savory, tangy depth that rounds out the seasoning.

The step that matters

Brown the flour in butter before adding the stock. Cooking the flour in fat until it darkens develops flavor and removes raw starch taste, and it thickens more evenly when stirred constantly into the hot stock, preventing lumps.

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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