Name: Cockle Soup
Ingredients: 1 knuckle of veal; 1 blade of mace; a few peppercorns; 2 anchovies; 3 quarts of water; ½ peck of cockles

Why it works: Veal and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,761 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Cockle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

Boil the knuckle of veal with mace, peppercorns, and anchovies in 3 quarts of water until reduced to 1 quart.
Open the cockles.
Strain the liquor.
Remove the gravy from the knuckle of veal.

Combine and simmer

Combine the gravy with the cockles and their liquor.
Simmer gently until well combined.

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.

Veal + macetop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,761 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Knuckle of veal: Releases gelatin and flavour into the broth, giving the soup body and richness.
Cockles: Provide the main shellfish flavour and their own briny liquor, adding savoury depth.
Anchovies: Add a salty, savoury depth to the broth without a distinctly fishy taste.

“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.