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Soup

Calfs-head or Mock-turtle Soup

A soup made with calf's head, tomatoes, egg balls, sherry, and lemon slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Calfs-head or Mock-turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter to make a brown roux.

  2. Add the flour and let it brown.

  3. Slowly add the water from boiling the calf's head.

  4. Stir in the strained tomatoes and simmer for 30 minutes.

  5. Skim off any fat and season with salt and pepper.

Finish the soup

  1. Add the pieces of boiled calf's head, egg balls, sherry, and lemon slices.

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. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Tomato + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

Butter
Fat that is browned with the flour to build a nutty, colored roux.
Flour
Thickens the broth as it browns into the roux.
Calf's head
Supplies the meat and gelatinous body of the soup.
Strained tomatoes
Add acidity and body to the broth during simmering.
Sherry
Adds aromatic depth and a sweet-tart note to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Browning the roux. Flour browned in butter must be cooked slowly and stirred; scorched flour gives a bitter taste that carries into the whole soup, while pale flour leaves less flavor and thickens less well.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, pepper, egg, sherry, lemon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, egg, sherry, lemon. 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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