Skip to main content
Main

Calf's Head Soup

A hearty soup made from a calf's head, celery, carrots, turnips, spices, and rice flour thickener, finished with sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Celery and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Calf's Head Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Combine celery, carrots, turnips, mace, cloves, and peppercorns in a large pot.

  2. Simmer gently for 6 to 7 hours.

  3. Strain the broth into a clean pan and set aside.

Prepare and stew the head

  1. Remove the bone from the calf's head. Wash the head.

  2. Roll the head up and bind the rolled head with twine.

  3. Place the rolled head in a stewpan with the bones and tongue, and cover with beef stock.

  4. Stew for 1.5 hours.

  5. Transfer the head to a deep earthen pan and let it cool in the broth to prevent drying.

  6. Once cool, strain the broth and skim off the fat.

Make the soup

  1. Heat 5 pints of the broth in a large saucepan.

  2. Cut the calf's head into small thick slices or inch squares and add to the soup, along with the skin and tongue.

  3. If the skin is not tender, simmer until it is.

  4. Mix rice flour with cayenne and mushroom ketchup, adding enough cold broth or water to make a batter. Stir the mixture into the soup.

  5. Boil for 8 to 10 minutes. Skim off any scum.

  6. Add sherry.

  7. Serve the soup with fried forcemeat balls and a splash of lemon juice if desired.

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. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Turnip + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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 main body of meat, skin, and gelatin that give the soup its richness.
Rice flour
Thickens the broth into a smooth, body-rich soup when stirred in as a batter.
Beef stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour of the soup.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds deep savoury, umami flavour to the broth.
Sherry
Adds a sweet, aromatic note to finish the soup.

The step that matters

Stirring the rice flour batter into the soup. Rice flour clumps if added dry or too thick, so it must be mixed smooth with cold liquid first. Then it thickens evenly as the soup heats and boils.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (celery, carrot, turnip, clove, beef, rice, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, carrot, turnip, clove, beef, rice, flour. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipes