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Mock Turtle Soup

A broth made from calf's head, spices, vegetables, and cooked meat, finished with butter, flour, lemon, and optional sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 20 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Mock Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the head

  1. Clean the calf's head thoroughly and cut it into several pieces.

  2. Soak the pieces in cold water for 1 hour, then drain.

Make the stock

  1. Add 4 quarts of cold water and 1 tablespoon of coarse sea salt.

  2. Cook slowly until the meat slips from the bones.

  3. Remove the meat but leave the bones in the pot.

  4. Add cloves, peppercorns, allspice, onions, carrots, turnip, celery roots, herbs, and cinnamon stick.

  5. Let the mixture simmer for 2 hours.

  6. Strain the stock and cool it.

  7. Before serving, remove the fat from the stock.

Finish the soup

  1. In a separate pan, brown 1 tablespoon of butter.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of flour and gradually stir in the stock.

  3. Season with salt and pepper if needed.

  4. Dice ½ cup of the cooked meat.

  5. Add the diced meat to the stock along with the sliced hard-boiled eggs.

  6. Stir in the juice of ½ lemon and thin slices of lemon rind.

  7. Add sherry if desired.

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 + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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 texture.
Butter
Browned with flour to form a roux that thickens the stock.
Flour
Thickens the stock when cooked with browned butter into a roux.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add substance and a mild, creamy texture to the finished soup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, savoury stock.

The step that matters

Remove the fat from the stock before serving. Fat left on the surface makes the soup greasy and heavy, and it sets as a film when chilled, so skimming it after cooling gives a clean, lighter broth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, allspice, carrot, turnip, celery, cinnamon, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, allspice, carrot, turnip, celery, cinnamon, butter. 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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