Skip to main content
Main

Mock Turtle Soup

A soup made from a calf's head, simmered for hours, finished with butter, flour, mace, thyme, lemon, sherry, eggs, and optional mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Thyme and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,973 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Mock Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Cover the cleaned calf's head with cold water and simmer for 6-8 hours with a little coarse sea salt.

  2. Let it cool, then remove all fat.

Make the soup

  1. One hour before serving, reheat the soup and season with mace and thyme.

  2. Melt the butter in a pan, then add brown flour and mix until smooth.

  3. Stir the flour mixture into the soup.

  4. Use some of the cold meat to make balls, and season the meat balls.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in the yolk of a raw egg just before serving.

  2. Slice hard-boiled eggs and add to the tureen.

  3. Season the soup with lemon juice and sherry wine.

  4. Add half a can of mushrooms for an extra touch.

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. Thyme + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Thyme + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together326 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Thyme + winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,349 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

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

  5. Thyme + sherrytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together702 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Calf's head
Provides the meat, bones and gelatin that give the soup its body and richness.
Brown flour
Thickens the soup when cooked in butter, giving it body and a deeper colour.
Butter
Fat that cooks with the flour to form a roux for thickening and flavour.
Raw egg yolk
Enriches the soup and adds creaminess when stirred in at the end.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, heavy flavour of the soup.

The step that matters

Stir the flour mixture into the soup. Flour clumps if added raw or unevenly; cooking it smooth in butter first lets it blend into the soup and thicken it evenly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (thyme, walnut, butter, flour, lemon, sherry, wine):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against thyme, walnut, butter, flour, lemon, sherry, wine. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes