Skip to main content
Main

Mock-Turtle Soup

A soup made with bacon water, vegetables, potato flour, sherry, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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

Make the soup

  1. In a pot, bring the water to a boil.

  2. Add the tender vegetables and mash them to a pulp.

  3. Combine the vegetable pulp with the broth and heat slowly.

  4. Once boiling, stir in the potato flour mixed with a little water and simmer for 1 minute.

  5. Season with pepper and salt.

  6. Add coloring if necessary.

Finish and serve

  1. In a tureen, mix the sherry and lemon juice.

  2. Pour the soup over the mixture and 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

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

  3. Potato + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Potato flour
Thickens the soup as it simmers, giving it body.
Sherry
Adds aromatic depth and a sweet, wine-like flavour to the soup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the soup.

The step that matters

Stir in the potato flour mixture. Potato flour must be mixed smoothly with a little water before it goes into the boiling soup, otherwise it can clump. Simmering it briefly lets the starch swell and thicken the liquid evenly.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, pepper, sherry, lemon):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, pepper, sherry, lemon. 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.

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipes