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For Turtle, Mock Turtle, or Made Dishes

A veal-based mock turtle made with breadcrumbs, milk, parsley, shallot, egg yolks, and spices, formed into balls for soup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

For Turtle, Mock Turtle, or Made Dishes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the forcemeat

  1. Pound the veal in a marble mortar.

  2. Rub it through a sieve with the udder and butter.

  3. In a stew-pan, moisten the bread crumbs with milk.

  4. Add chopped parsley and shallot, and mix until smooth.

  5. Pass the mixture through a sieve and let it cool.

  6. Pound and mix with the hard-boiled egg yolks.

  7. Season with salt, pepper, and curry powder or cayenne.

  8. Add the raw egg yolks and mix well.

Shape and serve

  1. Form small balls and add them to the soup ten minutes 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. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Forms the main body of the forcemeat, giving it its bulk and mild meaty flavour.
Bread crumbs
Absorb milk and bind the mixture, helping the balls hold a tender, light texture.
Raw egg yolks
Bind the mixture together and enrich it so the balls hold their shape when cooked.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Add body and a crumbly richness that softens the mixture's texture.
Udder
Adds fat and moisture, keeping the forcemeat tender and rich.

The step that matters

Forming and adding the balls to the soup. If the mixture is too wet or not cooled and bound properly, the balls may fall apart or turn soggy in the soup. Chilling the mixture firms the fat and egg so the balls hold their shape while simmering.

Swap the shallot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, butter, bread, milk, parsley, egg, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, bread, milk, parsley, egg, pepper. 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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