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Mock-turtle Soup

A soup made with turtle meat, liver, eggs, lemon, catsup, wine, butter, flour, and boiling soup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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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 base

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and stir until nicely browned, not burned.

  3. Gradually add the boiling soup while stirring constantly.

  4. Boil and stir for 5 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the diced meat and liver to the soup and bring to a boil.

  2. Remove the saucepan from the heat and stir in the catsup, salt, pepper, and wine.

  3. Place the sliced eggs and lemon in a tureen and pour the soup over them to 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Browned with the butter, it thickens the soup and adds a nutty, toasted flavour.
Butter
Carries the flour's browning and adds richness to the soup base.
Turtle meat
Provides the main body and chewy texture of the soup.
Turtle liver
Adds depth and a rich, savoury flavour to the soup.
Wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth, balancing the richness of the soup.
Catsup
Adds tomato sweetness and acidity, rounding out the seasoning.

The step that matters

Browning the flour. Flour cooked in butter must be stirred until nicely browned but not burned. Burnt flour turns bitter and dark, and it spoils the flavour of the whole soup, while under-browned flour leaves a raw, pasty taste.

“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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