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Mock Turtle Soup

A soup made from calf's head, veal, vegetables, Madeira, and thickened with flour, butter, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 19 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and carrot 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. Scald the calf's head to remove hair, then boil until tender.

  2. Once cold, cut the head into ¼ inch pieces.

Make the broth

  1. Make gravy by browning veal and vegetables in butter.

  2. Add 4 quarts of water and boil slowly.

  3. Strain the broth and remove the fat when cold.

Finish and serve

  1. In a stewpan, combine the broth, calf's head pieces, Madeira, shallots, salt, and Cayenne pepper.

  2. Thicken with a mixture of flour and butter, then add yolks of eggs and forcemeat balls.

  3. Serve hot.

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. Turnip + carrottop 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 body and texture of the soup once boiled until tender.
Veal
Browned to build the gravy, adding roasted, savoury depth to the broth.
Butter
Browns the veal and vegetables and, mixed with flour, thickens the soup.
Flour
Combined with butter to thicken the broth into a smoother body.
Yolks of eggs
Added at the end to enrich the soup and give it a richer, silkier texture.
Madeira
Adds sweetness and aromatic depth to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Thicken with flour and butter. Flour must be cooked into the butter and the broth kept at a gentle simmer so it thickens smoothly without lumps; egg yolks should be added off the boil so they enrich the soup without curdling.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, ham, onion, clove, turnip, carrot, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, ham, onion, clove, turnip, carrot, 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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