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Green Turtle Soup

A soup made from turtle meat, herbs, onions, lemon juice, Madeira, and thickened with brown flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 turtle

  1. Remove the entrails from the turtle and cut up the coarser parts of the meat and bones.

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

  3. Stew slowly for 4 hours without letting it stop boiling.

Finish the soup

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

  2. Thicken the soup with brown flour, return it to the pot, and simmer gently for another hour.

  3. If there are eggs in the turtle, boil them separately for 4 hours and add them to the soup before serving.

  4. If not, add force meat balls, then stir in the lemon juice and Madeira, and serve immediately.

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. Onion + meattop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 body of the soup, giving it its character.
Green fat
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the broth.
Brown flour
Thickens the soup, giving it body as it simmers.
Madeira
Adds aroma and a rounded sweetness at the end of cooking.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich broth.

The step that matters

Keep the stew at a steady boil for 4 hours. Long, continuous simmering is needed to extract flavour and gelatin from the turtle meat and bones. If the pot stops boiling, the meat will not become tender and the broth will taste thin.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, pepper, flour, meat. 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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