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Mock Terrapin Soup

A soup made from calf's liver, vegetables, and a sauce of fried pork fat, egg yolk, and wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Mock Terrapin Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth

  1. Boil the calf's liver in salted water for 30 minutes.

  2. Add small herbs, black pepper, ground cloves, onion, and carrot.

  3. Remove the vegetables and mash them through a colander or sieve.

Make the balls

  1. Fry salt pork or bacon until the fat is rendered.

  2. Add a slice of onion, celery, small peppers, and tomato to the fat and cook until browned.

  3. Mix salad oil, yolk of hard-boiled egg, and cayenne pepper to form a paste.

  4. Shape the paste into small balls.

Combine and serve

  1. Add the balls to the Spanish sauce and combine the sauce with the soup.

  2. When the balls rise to the top, skim them out.

  3. In a tureen, combine white wine and a slice of lemon.

  4. Pour the soup into the tureen.

  5. Cut the calf's liver into small pieces and add the liver pieces to the soup.

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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Celery + tomatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Calf's liver
Forms the main body of the soup, giving it a rich, meaty flavor.
Yolk of hard-boiled egg
Binds with the salad oil into a paste that holds the small balls together.
Salt pork or bacon
Supplies rendered fat for frying the vegetables, adding savory flavor.
Tomato
Adds acidity and color to the sauce base.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the soup.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (liver, pepper, onion, carrot, pork, celery, tomato):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against liver, pepper, onion, carrot, pork, celery, tomato. 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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