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Mock, Turtle

A stew of moorfowl cooked with flour, butter, gravy, mace, cloves, mushroom ketchup, and Port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Mock, Turtle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the birds

  1. Truss the moorfowl, keeping their heads on, and draw the legs inside the body.

  2. Mix flour, salt, and pepper.

  3. Add a piece of butter and place a small bit inside each bird.

  4. Brown the birds all over in butter until nicely browned.

Make the sauce

  1. Brown some butter and flour.

  2. Add good gravy seasoned with pepper, salt, mace, and crushed cloves.

  3. Boil the sauce.

Stew and finish

  1. Add the moorfowl.

  2. Let them stew slowly until tender. If the birds are old, stew for 2 hours; if young, stew for 1 hour.

  3. Before serving, add mushroom ketchup and Port 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. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Clove + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,663 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Mushroom + port winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together570 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Moorfowl
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through slow stewing.
Flour
Thickens the sauce and helps the birds take on a browned coating.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the birds brown evenly in the pan.
Good gravy
Forms the liquid base of the stew and carries the seasonings.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth of flavour to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stew slowly until tender. Moorfowl meat is firm and lean, so it needs long, gentle simmering to break down connective tissue. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and make the sauce cloudy, so keep the stew at a slow simmer and test for tenderness before serving.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, pepper, butter, clove, mushroom, ketchup, port wine):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, pepper, butter, clove, mushroom, ketchup, port wine. 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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