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Terrapin Soup

A soup made from a 4‑lb turtle simmered with onion, cloves, salt, paprika, butter, flour, wine, and lemon slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,150 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Terrapin Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Boil the turtle in cold water until the meat leaves the bones, about 3 hours.

  2. Add the sliced onion, cloves, salt, and paprika to taste.

  3. Blend the butter and flour together and add just before taking off the heat.

Serve

  1. When ready to serve, add the wine and thinly sliced lemons.

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. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

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

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

Turtle
Provides the meat and the body of the soup as it cooks down.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, rounding out the flavor of the broth.
Flour
Thickens the soup slightly when blended with butter and stirred in.
Madeira or claret wine
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the rich broth.
Lemons
Add sharp acidity and fresh citrus aroma to balance the soup.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour blend. Flour clumps if dropped in directly. Blending it with butter first and adding it just before removing the pot from heat lets it thicken the soup smoothly without lumps or scorching.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Kalefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, butter, flour, wine, 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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