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Calf's Head Soup Another Way

A soup made from a calf's head, veal stock, onions, cloves, nutmeg, mace, sweet herbs, butter, flour, sugar, eggs, fried balls, and wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Calf's Head Soup Another Way

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the head

  1. Wash the calf's head thoroughly and boil it for 1.5 hours.

  2. Remove the meat from the bones and skim the soup.

Make the soup

  1. Add the veal stock and cut the meat into small square pieces.

  2. Add the onions, cloves, nutmeg, mace, and finely chopped herbs.

  3. Strain the soup.

  4. In a pan, heat the butter, then stir in some flour and a little sugar.

  5. Add this mixture to the soup, stirring well and seasoning to taste.

  6. Finally, add eggs, fried balls, and the wine. Serve hot.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Calf's head
Provides the meat and gelatinous body that gives the soup its substance.
Veal stock
Forms the liquid base and carries the savoury flavour of the soup.
Butter
Melted with flour to form a roux that thickens the soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup when cooked in butter as a roux.
Eggs
Added at the end to enrich the soup and add body.
Wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter and flour mixture into the soup. Flour lumps if added raw or unevenly, so it should be cooked in the butter first and stirred in well to thicken the soup smoothly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, clove, nutmeg, mace, butter, flour, sugar):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, clove, nutmeg, mace, butter, flour, sugar. 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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