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Soup

Mock Turtle

A hearty beef and cow heel soup thickened with flour and flavored with lemon, mushroom catsup, and wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Mock Turtle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Boil the beef and cow heel gently for 15 minutes.

  2. Remove the cover and brown the meat.

  3. Add boiling water to the stewpan.

  4. Simmer for 2 hours.

  5. Cut the meat into bite-sized pieces.

Finish the soup

  1. Add the meat to the soup.

  2. Mix 2-3 tablespoons of flour with a ladleful of gravy until smooth, then pour the mixture back into the stewpan.

  3. Simmer for another 30 minutes.

  4. Skim the soup and strain it through a sieve.

  5. Add lemon juice, mushroom catsup, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and wine to the soup, then simmer for an additional 5 minutes.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Beef + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Gravy beef
Provides the main meat flavour and body as it simmers into the broth.
Cow heel
Adds gelatin, giving the soup a richer, silkier body as it cooks.
Butter
Carries fat and flavour into the base and helps build a smooth roux.
Flour
Thickens the soup as a roux or slurry, giving it a smoother, heavier texture.
Madeira or sherry wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour with gravy until smooth. Flour clumps if added directly to hot liquid. Blending it first with a ladleful of gravy lets the starch disperse evenly, so the soup thickens smoothly without lumps.

“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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