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Mock Turtle Soup

A rich soup made from calf's head, vegetables, and forcemeat balls, finished with wine and soy sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 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 Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Soak the calf's head in cold water and wash it thoroughly.

  2. In a large pot, boil the head in 6 quarts of water for 4 hours.

  3. Strain the broth into a jar and let it cool overnight; skim off the fat.

Make the soup

  1. In a pot, combine 2 quarts of the broth, cloves, peppercorns, salt, onions, carrots, and turnips; boil for 2 hours.

  2. Cut the remaining meat from the head into small pieces and add to the pot; boil for 1 hour.

  3. Strain the vegetable broth into the pot and boil for another 1.5 hours.

  4. Mix 3 tablespoons of browned flour with ½ pound of butter; stir into the soup and boil for 10 minutes.

  5. Add ½ pint of red wine and give it one final boil.

Serve

  1. In a tureen, place the forcemeat balls, lemon slices, yolks of hard-boiled eggs, and soy sauce.

  2. Pour the hot soup over the ingredients in the tureen and serve immediately.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 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

Browned flour
Thickens the broth, giving the soup a fuller body.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, rounding out the flavour and body of the soup.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the finished soup.
Hard-boiled eggs
Yolks add richness and a creamy texture to the soup.
Calf's head
Supplies gelatin and meat flavour, giving the stock body and savour.

The step that matters

Skimming the cooled broth. Fat solidifies on top of the chilled broth and is easy to remove as a layer. Leaving it in would make the finished soup greasy and heavy.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, carrot, turnip, flour, butter, red wine, pepper. 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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