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Calf S-head Soup, or Mock Turtle

A soup made from calf's head, stock, spices, forcemeat balls, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

Calf S-head Soup, or Mock Turtle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the head

  1. Parboil the calf's head.

  2. Remove the skin from the calf's head.

  3. Cut the calf's head into 1.5‑inch square pieces.

  4. Remove the black part of the eyes.

  5. Cut the remaining eye parts into rings.

  6. Skin the tongue.

  7. Slice the tongue.

  8. Add all the meat to the stock.

Make the soup

  1. Season the stock with cayenne, mace, salt, lemon peel, and white wine.

  2. Add the forcemeat balls to the stock.

  3. Stew for 1.5 hours.

  4. Mix the flour with cold water and half a cup of the soup. Stir the mixture into the pot.

  5. Add the juice of half a lemon and the hard‑boiled egg yolks.

  6. Let it simmer for 10 minutes.

  7. Serve in a tureen.

Make the forcemeat balls

  1. If eggs are scarce, pound the hard‑boiled yolks with a pinch of salt.

  2. Add a raw yolk to the mixture. Mix well.

  3. Roll the mixture into small sausages.

  4. Cut the sausages into small pieces.

  5. Dust the pieces with flour.

  6. Boil the pieces in water.

  7. Transfer the pieces to cold water.

  8. Drain the pieces before adding to the soup.

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. Lemon + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. Pepper + white winetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Calf's head
Provides the gelatinous body and meat that give the soup its rich texture.
Stock
Forms the liquid base and carries the flavour of the whole soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it is stirred in with cold water.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Enrich the soup and give the forcemeat balls a firm, crumbly body.
Raw egg yolks
Bind the forcemeat mixture so it holds together when shaped.
White wine
Adds acidity and a bright, aromatic note to the stock.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour and water mixture. Flour mixed with cold water and then combined with hot soup disperses evenly, so it thickens smoothly without lumps. Added dry or all at once, the starch clumps and the soup turns uneven.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, lemon, white wine, flour, egg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, lemon, white wine, flour, egg. 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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