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Mock Turtle Soup

A soup made from a cat's head, onions, spices, butter, flour, port wine, lemon slices, eggs, and meatballs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

Mock Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Place the cat's head, feet, and skin in a pot with water and add the chopped onions.

  2. Bring to a boil, skimming the surface, and cook until the meat falls from the bone.

  3. Strain the soup and return it to the pot.

Season and rest

  1. Add cloves, salt, pepper, mace, nutmeg, and red pepper.

  2. Cut up half the meat and add it to the soup, heating it through.

  3. Let the soup sit overnight.

Finish the soup

  1. The next day, add more spices, butter, and flour rubbed in.

  2. Stir in the port wine, lemon slices, beaten eggs, and force meat balls.

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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and body, and helps carry the spice flavour.
Flour
Rubbed in with butter to thicken the soup and give it body.
Eggs
Beaten eggs stirred in to add richness and help bind the soup.
Port wine
Adds sweetness, depth and acidity to the soup.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour and butter. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps; rubbing it into butter first coats the starch granules so they disperse and thicken smoothly.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, pepper, mace, nutmeg, butter, flour, 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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