Skip to main content
Main

Mock Turtle Soup

A rich broth made from beef bones, veal, calf head, eggs, and thickened with flour and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 22 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Mock Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Boil meat bones in 8 gallons of water with carrots, onions, turnips, mace, cloves, allspice, laurel leaves, and whole peppers to make stock.

  2. Brown 4 pounds of small scraps of meat or bones, 5 carrots, 5 turnips, and 5 onions in 1 pound of butter in the oven.

  3. Add 2 pounds of flour to the browned mixture and stir until brown.

  4. Scrape the browned mixture into the boiling stock, adding salt, pepper, and caramel for color.

  5. Simmer the stock for 10 to 15 hours on low heat, then strain and cool, skimming off grease.

  6. Reheat the stock, seasoning to taste and thickening to a heavy cream consistency.

Prepare the meats and garnish

  1. Boil the calf’s head and feet, then cut into dice-sized pieces.

  2. Add the diced calf’s head and feet to the stock one hour before serving.

  3. Fry 2 pounds of small-cut lean veal until brown, then add to the soup.

  4. Boil 2 dozen eggs hard, separate the yolks from the whites, and mash the yolks.

  5. Mix the mashed yolks with flour to make a stiff paste, forming marble-sized balls.

  6. Combine the remaining paste with 1 pound of chopped veal to make larger balls.

  7. Boil all balls in water for 15 minutes, strain, and add to the soup along with sliced egg whites.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Carrot + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,021 recipes

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

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Browns the vegetables and meat scraps, adding roasted flavour and colour to the stock.
Flour
Browns and thickens the stock to the heavy cream consistency described.
Eggs
Mashed yolks bind with flour into a stiff paste that forms the soup's dumplings.
Meat bones
Simmered for hours to extract flavour and body into the stock.

The step that matters

Simmering the stock for 10 to 15 hours. Long, low simmering slowly extracts gelatin and flavour from bones; a hard boil can cloud the stock and make it greasy, so skim and strain carefully.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, beef, carrot, onion, turnip, clove, allspice):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, beef, carrot, onion, turnip, 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.

You might also like

Beef, Mutton, or Veal BrothBeef, Mutton, or Veal Broth6 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipes