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Mock Terrapin Soup

A soup made with calf's liver, egg yolks, flour, butter, and sherry wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Mock Terrapin Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liver

  1. Wash the calf's liver in cold water, then place it in warm water and parboil it.

  2. Remove the liver, chop it finely, and return it to the boiling water.

Make the soup

  1. Mix the flour with the butter until smooth, then stir it into the soup.

  2. Prepare small balls by mashing the hard-boiled egg yolk and binding it with the raw egg yolk and a little flour.

  3. Add the egg balls to the soup and boil for 10 minutes.

  4. Stir in the Sherry wine before serving.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Flour and butter 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 liver
Forms the main body of the soup and gives it its rich, meaty flavour.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks, giving it a smoother body.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the flour blend smoothly into the soup.
Raw egg yolk
Binds the mashed hard-boiled yolk into small balls that hold their shape.
Sherry wine
Adds acidity and a deeper, nutty aroma to finish the soup.

The step that matters

Boiling the egg balls. Egg balls set as the proteins in the yolks firm up with heat. Boiling them for the stated time firms them enough to hold their shape without the soup becoming cloudy or the balls breaking apart.

“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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