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Mock Turtle Soup

A soup made with calf's liver, veal, onion, and hard boiled eggs, seasoned with salt, pepper, and cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mock Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Boil the calf's liver and veal in water for 2 hours, skimming regularly.

  2. Strain the broth and chop the meat finely.

Finish the soup

  1. Add the chopped meat and onion to the broth.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, and ground cloves.

  3. Thicken the soup with browned flour and bring to a boil.

Serve

  1. Serve in a tureen with chopped hard boiled eggs and sliced lemon.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Liver + vealtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together392 recipes

    Shared aroma: enoic acid (butter, cheesy).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Provides the meat and body that give the broth its rich, savory flavor.
Calf's liver
Adds depth and a more pronounced meaty flavor to the broth.
Browned flour
Thickens the broth and adds a toasted, nutty note.
Hard boiled eggs
Adds texture and mild richness as a garnish-style addition to the soup.

The step that matters

Thicken with browned flour. Flour must be added to hot liquid gradually and stirred well, or it clumps instead of dispersing. Bringing the soup to a boil after adding it lets the starch swell and thicken evenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (liver, veal, pepper, clove, flour, egg, lemon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against liver, veal, pepper, clove, flour, egg, lemon. 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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