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Mock Turtle Soup

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 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 head

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

  2. Boil the head in a large pot with 6 quarts of water for 4 hours.

  3. Strain the broth into a jar and let it cool overnight.

  4. Skim off the fat from the cooled broth.

Make the soup

  1. Combine 2 quarts of the broth, cloves, peppercorns, salt, onions, carrots, and turnips in a pot and boil the mixture for 2 hours.

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

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

  4. Mix 3 tablespoons of browned flour with ½ pound of butter, stir the mixture into the soup, add red wine, and boil for 10 minutes.

Serve

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

  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 + carrottop 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. Clove + turniptop 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 gelatinous meat and body that gives the soup its rich texture.
Butter
Enriches the soup with fat, adding richness and a smooth mouthfeel.
Browned flour
Thickens the soup and adds a toasted, nutty depth of flavour.
Red wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the finished soup.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add body and a creamy, rich element when the yolks are served in the soup.

The step that matters

Mixing the browned flour and butter into the soup. Stirring a flour-butter mixture into hot liquid can form lumps if it is not evenly blended first. Thorough stirring lets the starch disperse and thicken the soup smoothly.

Swap the onion

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

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

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