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Soup

Mock Turtle Thick

A thick soup made from calf’s head, ham, vegetables, and sherry, thickened with flour and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Mock Turtle Thick

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fry the ham and chopped vegetables in butter.

  2. Wash the calf's head well and boil it for 15 minutes in salted water.

Make the soup

  1. Clear the fat from the soup.

  2. Strain out the pieces of oxtail, herbs, and vegetables.

  3. Thicken the soup with browned flour and butter. Stir until it boils.

  4. Simmer for 20 minutes.

  5. Add the sherry.

  6. Return some nice pieces of tail.

  7. Serve.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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

Calf's head
Provides the meat and gelatin that give the soup its body and rich mouthfeel.
Butter
Carries the frying flavor of the ham and vegetables and, with flour, forms the thickening roux.
Flour
Browned with butter, it thickens the soup into a smooth, velvety body.
Lean ham
Fried at the start, it adds savory, browned depth to the stock.
Sherry
Added at the end, it contributes acidity and a fragrant, nutty aroma.

The step that matters

Thicken the soup with browned flour and butter. Flour must be cooked in the fat until it loses its raw taste and is stirred until boiling so it thickens evenly without lumps. Adding it to hot liquid unevenly causes clumps that do not smooth out.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sherry, butter, flour, onion, carrot, turnip, clove):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Plumfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sherry, butter, flour, onion, carrot, turnip, clove. 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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