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Clear Mock Turtle

A clear soup made from calf's head, onions, carrots, turnips, celery, mace, peppercorns, cloves, bay leaf, thickened with potato flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery 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 ↓

Clear Mock Turtle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the head

  1. Wash the calf's head well in salt and water, then place it in a soup pot and cover with water.

  2. Boil for 10 minutes, then pour away the water.

Simmer the soup

  1. Fry the onions and add them to the soup pot with the carrots, turnips, celery, mace, peppercorns, cloves, bay leaf, and enough stock or water to cover the cheek.

  2. Simmer gently for 4 hours until the cheek is tender.

  3. Remove the meat from the bones and select the best pieces to serve in the soup.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the soup and remove the fat.

  2. Thicken the soup slightly with potato flour, season to taste, and add lemon juice and sherry 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. Carrot + celerytop 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. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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 bones that give the soup body and richness.
Onions
Build the savoury base and sweetness as they cook down.
Potato flour
Thickens the strained soup slightly to give it a fuller texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, heavy broth.

The step that matters

Simmering gently for 4 hours. A gentle simmer lets the connective tissue in the cheek break down into gelatin without the broth turning cloudy or greasy. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and emulsify fat into the liquid.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, carrot, turnip, celery, clove, potato, flour):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, carrot, turnip, celery, clove, potato, 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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