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Mock Turtle Soup

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cook the calf's head in the stock with the herbs, lemon rind, peppercorns, cloves, and ham until tender.

  2. Remove the ham, chop it finely, and cut half the meat from the head into small pieces.

  3. Return the bones to the pan and cook gently for 1 hour longer.

  4. Strain the stock, thicken it with the flour, and add pepper, salt, ketchup, and sherry.

  5. Add the egg balls, forcemeat balls, and pieces of meat, then serve.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Mushroom + sherrytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,176 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-methylphenol (smoky, clove).

  4. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Clove + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,663 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, ham, pepper, flour, mushroom, ketchup, sherry):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Applefits about as well
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Red currantfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, ham, pepper, flour, mushroom, ketchup, sherry. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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