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Another Way to Make Mock Turtle Soup

A soup made with veal or tripe, cow heels, gravy, butter, anchovies, spices, leeks, lemon, Madeira wine, and fried force‑meat and egg balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,973 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Another Way to Make Mock Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Cut the veal or tripe into small pieces and fry until pale brown.

  2. Remove the meat from the cow heels and cut into moderate-sized pieces.

  3. Combine the veal, cow heel meat, weak gravy, and butter in a pot.

Stew

  1. Add anchovies, salt, Cayenne pepper, mace, cloves, leeks, lemon thyme, parsley, and lemon peel, chopped finely.

  2. Stew gently for 3 hours.

  3. Squeeze in the lemon juice and add Madeira wine, then stew for another hour.

Finish

  1. Skim off the fat and add fried force-meat balls and egg-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.

  1. Lemon + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Leek + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together360 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Veal or tripe
Provides the main meat body and gelatinous richness to the soup.
Cow heels
Release gelatin during long stewing, giving the soup body and a silky mouthfeel.
Madeira wine
Adds sweetness and deep aromatic flavour that rounds out the savoury stock.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, long-cooked broth.
Anchovies
Contribute savoury depth, adding umami that gives the broth more richness.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 3 hours. Gentle heat without a rolling boil lets collagen from the veal and cow heels dissolve slowly, giving body. Boiling hard toughens the meat and makes the broth cloudy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, butter, pepper, clove, leek, lemon, thyme):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Winter savoryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, pepper, clove, leek, lemon, thyme. 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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