Skip to main content

Mock Turtle Soup

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and cucumber match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,067 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mock Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cook the meat in the soup until tender, about 30 to 45 minutes.

  2. Prepare forcemeat balls by mixing minced veal or fowl, suet, parsley, breadcrumbs, salt, pepper, cayenne, lemon peel, nutmeg, and allspice with egg yolk.

  3. Form the mixture into balls and fry until light brown; drain on a sieve.

  4. Make egg balls by pounding hard-boiled egg yolks with a little salt, raw egg yolk, and flour until they form small balls.

  5. Add the egg balls to the soup to cook them just before serving.

  6. Squeeze lemon juice into the tureen before serving. Optionally, add ox palates or pickled cucumbers for extra flavor.

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. Lemon + cucumbertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,067 recipes

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

  2. Sherry + cucumbertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together143 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  3. Sherry + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Egg + cucumbertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,346 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

Swap the cucumber

The recipe marks cucumber as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sherry, egg, lemon):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sherry, egg, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes