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Balls for Mock Turtle Soup

Small balls made from veal, butter, breadcrumbs, parsley, shallot, egg yolks, and spices, added to mock turtle soup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Balls for Mock Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the forcemeat

  1. Pound the veal in a mortar until smooth.

  2. Rub the veal through a sieve with the butter.

  3. Moisten the bread crumbs in milk and mix with parsley and shallot until a stiff paste forms.

  4. Once cold, combine the veal mixture with the bread paste and hard-boiled egg yolks.

  5. Season with salt, pepper, and curry powder or cayenne.

  6. Add the raw egg yolks and mix well.

  7. Form small balls from the mixture.

Serve

  1. Ten minutes before serving the soup, add the balls to the pot.

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. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Forms the main body of the balls and gives them a meaty, tender texture.
Bread crumbs
Soaked in milk, they add moisture and bind the mixture into a stiff paste.
Raw egg yolks
Bind the mixture together and enrich it as they set lightly during cooking.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Add body and a crumbly richness that helps give the mixture its texture.
Udder
Adds fat and richness, helping keep the mixture moist and tender.

The step that matters

Forming and adding the balls. The mixture must be cold and firm enough to hold its shape. If it is too warm or soft, the balls may fall apart when added to the hot soup, so the timing of adding them matters.

Swap the shallot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, butter, bread, milk, parsley, egg, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, bread, milk, parsley, egg, pepper. 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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