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Calf's Head Soup

A soup made from calf's head, water, herbs, spices, sherry, and optional egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove 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 ↓

Calf's Head Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Boil the calf's head in 6 quarts of water until the meat falls off the bones, about 4 hours.

  2. Remove the bones and chop the meat finely.

  3. Chop the onion and parsley, then mix with the meat.

Make the soup

  1. Add cayenne, black pepper, salt, allspice, cloves, summer savory, butter, and flour to the mixture.

  2. Boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Heat the sherry wine and stir it into the soup just before serving.

Serve

  1. Serve each bowl with a slice of lemon, a yolk of a hard-boiled egg, and a force meat ball, or stir the mashed yolks into the soup.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Parsley + summer savorytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together241 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + summer savorytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together52 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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 and gelatin that give the soup its body and richness.
Flour
Thickens the soup slightly as it cooks with the butter.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the spice flavours through the soup.
Sherry wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth when stirred in at the end.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and body when their mashed yolks are stirred into the soup.

The step that matters

Boil the calf's head until the meat falls off the bones. Undercooked meat stays tough and will not release its collagen, so the soup lacks body and flavour. The meat must be fully tender before the bones are removed.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, allspice, clove, summer savory, sherry, wine, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, allspice, clove, summer savory, sherry, wine, 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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