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Mock Turtle Soup

A soup made from calf's head, butter, flour, spices, eggs, and optional lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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

Prepare the head

  1. Clean the calf's head, removing the brains and washing them in cold water. Set aside the brains.

  2. Boil the head in enough water to cover until tender.

  3. Remove all meat and bones from the soup.

Make the soup

  1. Chop the meat and brains together finely in a chopping bowl.

  2. Brown the flour in a pan with the butter until golden.

  3. Mix in the nutmeg, black pepper, red pepper, ground spices, and salt.

  4. Add the chopped eggs and return the mixture to the soup liquor.

  5. Let it boil for 30 minutes.

  6. Add sliced lemon 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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

Calf's head
Provides the meat, brains and gelatin that give the soup its body and rich texture.
Butter
Fat that is browned with the flour, adding nutty aroma and richness to the thickening base.
Flour
Browned in butter to form a roux that thickens the soup and adds toasty flavour.
Hard boiled eggs
Add chopped egg texture and body to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in butter. Flour browned in butter must be stirred constantly until golden. Under-browning leaves a raw, pasty taste, while over-browning turns it bitter and dark, and it can scorch on the pan base.

“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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