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Mock Terrapin

A chicken stew with sherry, butter, flour, and stock, served with sliced hard‑boiled eggs and lemon or pickles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Mock Terrapin

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour, then gradually add the seasoned stock.

  3. Boil for 1 minute, then remove from heat.

Simmer and serve

  1. Add the chicken, salt, and pepper, then stir in the sherry wine.

  2. Simmer for 1 hour.

  3. Serve topped with sliced hard-boiled eggs and accompanied by lemon or pickles.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

Chicken
Provides the main protein, which becomes tender during the long gentle simmer.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce when cooked with the melted butter.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the flour to form the thickening base.
Sherry wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the sauce.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and a soft, creamy contrast as a topping.

The step that matters

Simmer for 1 hour. A gentle simmer keeps the sauce from scorching and lets the chicken become tender without toughening. Too hard a boil can make the sauce break and the meat dry and stringy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, chicken, pepper, sherry, wine, egg):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Grapefits about as well
  3. Plumfits about as well
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, chicken, pepper, sherry, wine, 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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