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Mock Turtle Soup

A soup made from peeled meat, butter, sage, flour, lemon, herbs, spices, sherry, and force‑meat balls, simmered for 1.5 hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and marjoram match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 507 recipes. Both carry 2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Mock Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Weigh and peel 6 ounces of meat.

  2. In a frying pan, melt 2 ounces of butter and fry the meat until light brown.

  3. Add 2 tablespoons of chopped sage and stir in 6 ounces of flour, letting it brown slightly.

  4. Gradually add some soup to liquify the mixture, stirring until it boils. Mix this with the rest of the soup in a stew-pan.

  5. Add the lemon peel, basil, marjoram, ground pepper, mace, and salt.

  6. Simmer the soup for 1.5 hours.

  7. Strain the soup through a sieve without rubbing.

Finish and serve

  1. Return the soup to a clean stew-pan.

  2. Add the meat pieces, sherry, and lemon juice.

  3. Simmer gently until the meat is tender, about 10 minutes before serving.

  4. Add force-meat balls and diced hard-boiled eggs.

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. Sage + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together507 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Basil + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together688 recipes

    Shared aroma: terpineol (pine, woody).

  3. Lemon + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together957 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Lemon + basiltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,823 recipes

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

  5. Sage + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together887 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Browned with the butter and meat, it thickens the soup into a body-rich base.
Butter
Fat that fries the meat and carries the flavour of the sage and flour.
Meat
Browned first and then simmered until tender, adding savoury depth and substance.
Sherry or ginger wine
Adds acidity and aromatic sweetness to round out the rich soup.
Hard-boiled eggs
Diced into the soup to add firm texture and richness.

The step that matters

Simmer the meat until tender, then add the sherry and lemon juice. Adding acid too early can toughen meat proteins and dull flavour, so the meat should soften fully first and the sherry and lemon are added near the end to keep the soup bright.

Swap the basil

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, butter, sage, flour, lemon, marjoram, pepper):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Rosemaryfits better
  4. Basilthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, butter, sage, flour, lemon, marjoram, 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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