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A hearty soup made from a calf's head, bones, tongue, and vegetables, thickened with rice flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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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 ↓

Modern Cookery

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the aromatic base

  1. Combine celery, carrots, turnips, mace, cloves, and peppercorns in a large pot and simmer gently for 6 to 7 hours.

  2. Strain the mixture into a clean pan and set aside.

Cook the calf's head

  1. Remove the bone from the calf's head, wash it, roll it up, and bind it with twine.

  2. Place the calf's head in a stewpan with the bones and tongue.

  3. Cover with beef stock and simmer for 1.5 hours, letting it cool in the liquid to prevent drying.

  4. Once cool, strain and skim the fat from the stock.

Make the soup

  1. Heat 5 pints of stock in a large saucepan.

  2. Cut the calf's head into small thick slices or 1-inch squares and add to the stock, along with the skin and tongue.

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

  4. Mix the rice flour, cayenne, mace, and enough cold broth or water to make a batter consistency.

  5. Stir the mixture into the soup and boil for 8 to 10 minutes, skimming off any scum.

  6. Add the sherry and 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 gelatinous meat and skin that give the soup body and richness.
Rice flour
Thickens the soup into a light body when stirred in as a batter.
Beef stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour of the whole soup.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds savoury depth and umami to the finished soup.
Sherry
Adds aromatic sweetness and acidity to finish the soup.

The step that matters

Stirring the rice flour batter into the soup. Rice flour must be smoothed into a thin batter with cold liquid first; added dry or lumpy, it clumps and won't thicken evenly. Boiling then cooks out the raw starch taste and sets the body.

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.

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