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Mock Turtle

A hearty soup made from calf head, onions, spices, anchovies, and enriched with butter, flour, wine, eggs, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the head

  1. Scald the calf's head.

  2. Wash the calf's head.

  3. Boil the calf's head for 30 minutes.

  4. Skin the calf's head.

  5. Remove the tongue from the calf's head.

Make the stew

  1. Add the tongue, skin, onions, cloves, mace, nutmeg, herbs, and anchovies to the strong veal gravy.

  2. Stew the mixture until tender.

  3. Remove the meat from the stew.

  4. Cut the meat into 2-inch pieces.

  5. Strain the liquid from the stew.

Finish and serve

  1. Melt butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir flour into the melted butter until smooth.

  3. Add the strained liquid, white wine, force meat balls, yolks of eggs, and lemon juice to the saucepan.

  4. Let the mixture stew for 1 hour.

  5. Add broth if the stew is too thick.

  6. 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. 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. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the butter and liquid into a smooth, body-rich sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour, and with flour forms the thickening base.
Yolks of eggs
Add richness and help thicken the soup as they heat.
White wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the soup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, heavy flavours.

The step that matters

Stirring flour into the melted butter until smooth. Flour lumps form if it is added to hot butter all at once or not stirred constantly. Cooking the flour briefly in the fat removes raw taste and helps the sauce thicken evenly without clumps.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, mace, nutmeg, butter, flour, white wine, meat):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, mace, nutmeg, butter, flour, white wine, meat. 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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