Name: Mock-Turtle Soup
Ingredients: 3 cow heels; herbs (your choice); pieces of boiled cow heels; veal; lemon juice

Why it works: Veal and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,580 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Mock-Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

Bake the cow heels with herbs until tender.

Serve

In a tureen, squeeze a little lemon juice.
Pour the soup over the lemon juice.
Serve with force-meat balls.

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 + lemontop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together4,580 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

Cow heels: Provide gelatin and body, giving the soup a rich, thick texture as they cook.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the rich broth and sharpens its flavour.

“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.