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Mock Turtle Soup

A soup made from calf's head, veal, salt pork, brains, and spices, served with meatballs.

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 Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Boil the calf's head until tender, then strain the liquid and refrigerate overnight.

  2. Skim off the fat, cut the meat and lights into pieces, and return them to the liquid.

  3. Stew slowly for 30 minutes, seasoning with pepper, cloves, mace, and onions if desired.

Make the balls

  1. For the balls, mix chopped veal, salt pork, and brains, seasoning with salt, pepper, mace, and cloves.

  2. Form the mixture into balls about the size of a half egg.

Finish and serve

  1. Just before serving, add ½ pint of white wine.

  2. Boil some of the balls in the soup and fry the remainder, serving them on a separate dish.

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

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Onion + porktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Veal + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,930 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  5. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 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 give the soup its rich texture.
Lean veal
Forms the tender, savoury base of the balls, binding with the other meats.
Salt pork
Adds fat to the balls, keeping them moist and flavourful during cooking.
Brains
Contribute a soft, creamy richness to the balls.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the rich, heavy broth.

The step that matters

Stew slowly for 30 minutes. Gentle simmering keeps the meat tender and lets collagen from the head slowly break down into gelatin, giving body to the soup. A hard boil would toughen the meat and cloud the broth.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, clove, mace, white wine, veal, pork):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Onionthe original
  4. Shallotfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, clove, mace, white wine, veal, pork. 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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