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To Make Mock Turtle

A savory dish made with veal knuckle, Madeira wine, and egg yolks, seasoned with spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

To Make Mock Turtle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the knuckle of veal into square pieces and season with cayenne, sweet herbs, mace, and black pepper.

  2. Make some gravy.

  3. Place the gravy in the oven.

Make the soup

  1. Add 1 pint of Madeira wine to the pot.

  2. Add the cow heels cut into square pieces.

  3. Thicken with yolks of eggs.

  4. Prepare force-meat balls and hard-boiled yolks.

  5. Add lemon juice and salt to taste.

  6. Add a little more wine 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Veal + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Veal + meattop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,890 recipes

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

  5. Veal + macetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,761 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Veal knuckle
Provides rich meat and gelatin that give the soup body and savoury depth.
Cow heels
Release gelatin during long cooking, adding body and a silky mouthfeel to the soup.
Madeira wine
Adds aromatic sweetness and depth that rounds out the savoury broth.
Yolks of eggs
Thicken the soup and add richness through their emulsifying proteins and fat.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich broth and balances its fattiness.

The step that matters

Thicken with yolks of eggs. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently, but above about 70°C they can curdle or scramble. Add them off the boil, with some hot liquid whisked in first, to keep the soup smooth.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, pepper, madeira wine, egg, meat, lemon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, pepper, madeira wine, egg, meat, lemon. 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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