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Soup

For Turtle, Mock Turtle, or Made Dishes

A soup featuring veal, udder, butter, bread crumbs, milk, parsley, shallot, egg yolks, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

For Turtle, Mock Turtle, or Made Dishes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the forcemeat

  1. Pound the veal in a marble mortar.

  2. Rub it through a sieve with the udder and butter.

  3. In a stew-pan, moisten the bread crumbs with milk.

  4. Add chopped parsley and shallot.

  5. Rub the mixture together until smooth.

  6. Pass the mixture through a sieve.

  7. Let the mixture cool.

  8. Pound the mixture.

  9. Mix the mixture with the hard-boiled egg yolks.

  10. Season with salt, pepper, and curry powder or cayenne.

  11. Add the raw egg yolks. Mix well.

Shape and serve

  1. Form small balls.

  2. Add the balls to the soup ten minutes 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. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Provides the main meaty body and bulk of the forcemeat balls.
Butter
Adds fat for a rich, tender texture and mouthfeel in the forcemeat.
Bread crumbs
Absorb milk and help bind the mixture so it holds its shape.
Raw egg yolks
Bind the forcemeat and help the balls hold together when cooked.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Add richness and a firmer, crumbly body to the mixture.

The step that matters

Rubbing the mixture smooth and passing it through a sieve. Pounding and sieving break down fibres so the forcemeat becomes fine and even. Without this, the balls turn coarse and may not hold together in the soup.

Swap the shallot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, butter, bread, milk, parsley, egg, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, bread, milk, parsley, egg, pepper. 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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