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Green Turtle Soup

A soup made from green turtle meat, bones, and fat, thickened with browned flour and enriched with eggs, wine, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Green Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Chop the coarser parts of the turtle, including entrails and bones.

  2. In a large pot, add the chopped turtle parts, 4 quarts of water, herbs, onions, pepper, and salt.

  3. Stew slowly for 4 hours, ensuring it continues to boil.

  4. Strain the soup and add the finer parts of the turtle and green fat that has been simmered for 1 hour in 2 quarts of water.

  5. Thicken the soup with browned flour.

  6. Simmer gently for another hour.

Make the mock eggs

  1. Boil the eggs separately for 4 hours.

  2. Mix the yolks of 3 hard-boiled eggs with 1 beaten raw egg and 1 teaspoon of butter to prepare mock eggs.

  3. Roll the mixture into pellets the size of turtle eggs.

  4. Boil the pellets for 2 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the boiled eggs to the soup before serving.

  2. Add the boiled pellets to the soup.

  3. Stir in the lemon juice and wine.

  4. Beat the mixture once.

  5. Serve.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Wine + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

Flour and butter 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

Turtle
Provides the main meat and gelatinous body that gives the soup its rich flavor and body.
Browned flour
Thickens the soup as its starch swells in the hot liquid, giving a smooth body and toasty flavor.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Form the base of the mock eggs, adding richness and a firm, crumbly texture.
Raw egg
Binds the mock egg mixture so it holds together when rolled into pellets.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, heavy flavor of the soup.

The step that matters

Boiling the pellets for only 2 minutes. Egg mixtures set when heated, so boiling too long makes the pellets rubbery or dry, while too short leaves the raw egg binder unsafe to eat.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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