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Another Calf's-head Soup

A hearty soup made from a cleaned calf's head, various meats, herbs, and forcemeat balls, simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 24 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Another Calf's-head Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth

  1. Boil the cleaned calf's head in 3 quarts of water for 1 hour.

  2. Parboil the sweetbreads with the head.

  3. In a pan, fry the sliced gravy beef, veal, mutton, and chopped onions in butter until light brown.

  4. Add the fried meat to the boiling water with the broken bones of the head.

  5. Rinse the frying pan with 2 quarts of boiling water and add the rinsed pan to the pot.

  6. Add the whole onions, sweet herbs, parsley, lemon peel, cloves, allspice, salt, and black pepper.

  7. Add the crumbled bread.

  8. Let the mixture stew slowly for 5 hours.

  9. Strain the soup.

  10. Remove the fat once cooled.

Finish the soup

  1. Cut the calf's head meat, tongue, and sweetbreads into small squares and add the squares to the soup.

  2. Mix the flour with 1 cup of soup and stir the mixture gently into the pot.

  3. Twenty minutes before serving, add cayenne, hard-boiled egg yolks, and forcemeat balls.

  4. Pour in the white wine.

  5. Add lemon juice just before serving.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Parsley + allspicetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Lemon + allspicetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Parsley + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the soup when mixed with broth before stirring in.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the finished soup.
Dried bread
Adds body to the broth as it stews.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Add richness and a creamy texture to the soup.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the soup. Flour mixed with cold or unmixed liquid forms lumps. Mixing it first with a cup of hot soup and stirring gently into the pot helps it disperse and thicken evenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, veal, mutton, parsley, lemon, clove, allspice):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, veal, mutton, parsley, lemon, clove, allspice. 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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