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Mock Terrapin

A savory dish of chicken giblets, eggs, cream, and sherry, seasoned with butter, nutmeg, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,015 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Mock Terrapin

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the chicken giblets until tender, then cut them into small pieces.

  2. In a pan, melt the butter over medium heat.

Make the filling

  1. Add the giblets to the pan and stir in the grated hard boiled eggs and nutmeg.

  2. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

  3. Thicken the cream with flour and add it to the mixture.

  4. Just before serving, stir in the sherry wine.

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. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Nutmeg + creamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

What each ingredient does

Chicken giblets
Provide the main meaty body of the dish once boiled until tender.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour when melted in the pan.
Hard boiled eggs
Add body and a firm, grated texture that thickens the mixture.
Cream
Gives a smooth, rich moisture, thickened with flour into a sauce.
Sherry wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Thicken the cream with flour. Flour must be cooked into the cream to prevent a raw, pasty taste and to give a smooth, stable thickened sauce rather than a lumpy one.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, butter, egg, pepper, cream, flour, sherry):

  1. Nutmegthe original
  2. Tarragonfits about as well
  3. Parsleyfits about as well
  4. Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, egg, pepper, cream, flour, sherry. 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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