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Soup

To Make Mock Turtle

Mock Turtle is a soup made with veal knuckle, Madeira wine, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Make Mock Turtle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the knuckle of veal into square pieces and season with cayenne, sweet herbs, mace, and black pepper.

  2. Make some gravy and send it to the oven.

  3. Add the Madeira wine and the cow heels cut into square pieces.

  4. Thicken the mixture with the egg yolks.

Finish and serve

  1. Prepare force-meat balls and hard-boiled egg yolks.

  2. Add lemon juice and salt to taste, and a little more wine before serving.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Veal + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Veal + meattop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,890 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Veal + macetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,761 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Veal knuckle
Provides meat and gelatin, giving body and a rich, savoury flavour to the soup.
Madeira wine
Adds acidity and aromatic sweetness that deepens the flavour of the broth.
Cow heels
Release gelatin during long cooking, adding body and a silky texture to the soup.
Egg yolks
Thicken the mixture through gentle heat and add richness and smoothness.

The step that matters

Thicken the mixture with the egg yolks. Egg yolks set when heated, so they must be added gently and off a rolling boil. Too much heat makes them scramble into grainy lumps instead of thickening the soup smoothly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, pepper, madeira wine, egg, meat, lemon):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, pepper, madeira wine, egg, meat, lemon. 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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