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Turtle Soup

A soup made with turtle meat, onions, garlic, parsley, thyme, tomatoes, and sherry, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a pot, heat lard and add turtle pieces. Simmer until cooked.

  2. Uncover the pot and add onions, garlic, parsley, thyme, and pepper. Fry for a few minutes.

  3. Add tomatoes, soup meat, and enough water to cover. Boil like an ordinary soup.

Finish and serve

  1. When ready to serve, stir in sherry and thicken with flour.

  2. Garnish with lemon slices and add burnt sugar for a darker color, 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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

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

  4. Garlic + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  5. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Turtle
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender as it simmers in the soup.
Onions
Frying them softens and sweetens their flavour, building the base of the soup.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid so the soup becomes body-rich rather than watery.
Sherry
Adds acidity and a rounded, aromatic flavour when stirred in at the end.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and body to the broth, balancing the rich meats.
Lard
Provides fat for frying and carries flavour through the early cooking.

The step that matters

Thickening with flour. Flour must be mixed into the soup so it does not clump; lumps form when dry flour meets hot liquid directly. Stirring it into a little cool liquid first, or adding it gradually while stirring, gives a smooth, even thickness.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (garlic, parsley, thyme, pepper, tomato, meat, sherry):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against garlic, parsley, thyme, pepper, tomato, meat, sherry. 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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