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Mock Turtle

A soup made from calf's head, onions, spices, anchovies, veal gravy, and a roux of butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Mock Turtle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the head

  1. Scald and wash the calf's head.

  2. Boil the calf's head for 30 minutes, then skin it and remove the tongue.

Make the stock

  1. In a pot, combine the tongue, skin, onions, cloves, mace, nutmeg, sweet herbs, anchovies, and veal gravy.

  2. Stew the mixture until tender.

  3. Strain the cooking liquid.

Prepare the meat

  1. Remove the meat from the head.

  2. Cut the meat into 2‑inch square pieces.

  3. Skin the tongue.

  4. Cut the tongue into 2‑inch square pieces.

Make the thickened soup

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter.

  2. Stir in the flour until smooth.

  3. Gradually add the strained liquid, stirring continuously until fully 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.

  1. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 meat and gelatinous body of the soup once simmered until tender.
Butter
Fat that carries flavour and, with flour, forms the base for thickening the soup.
Flour
Thickens the strained liquid into a smooth, body-rich soup when cooked with butter.
Onions
Adds savoury sweetness and aromatic depth to the stock as it stews.
Anchovies
Adds deep savoury flavour that rounds out the stock without tasting distinctly fishy.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the butter and adding the liquid. Stirring the flour until smooth and adding the liquid gradually while stirring prevents lumps, because flour starch clumps when it meets liquid unevenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, mace, nutmeg, butter, flour, veal):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, mace, nutmeg, butter, flour, veal. 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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