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Soup

Mock Turtle Soup

A soup made from calf's head, veal knuckle, onions, spices, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Mock Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the head

  1. Scald the hair off the calf's head and wash it clean.

  2. Boil the head in a large pot of water for 30 minutes.

  3. Remove the skin and tongue from the head.

Make the soup

  1. In a separate pot, combine the broth from the knuckle of veal, tongue, skin, onions, cloves, mace, nutmeg, and chopped herbs.

  2. Stew until tender.

  3. Cut the meat into 2-inch square pieces and slice the tongue.

  4. Strain the broth through a sieve.

  5. Melt the butter in a stewpan and add the strained broth.

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 + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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.
Knuckle of veal
Adds gelatin and savory depth to the broth as it stews.
Onions
Contribute sweetness and aromatic flavor to the broth.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the finished soup.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, clove, mace, nutmeg, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, clove, mace, nutmeg, 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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