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Terrapin, Maryland Style

Terrapin, Maryland Style is a boiled tortoise dish seasoned with salt, pepper, butter, and optional sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and sherry are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,505 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Terrapin, Maryland Style

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the terrapin

  1. Bring a pot of water to a boil.

  2. Add the terrapin and boil for about 15 minutes.

  3. Remove the terrapin and handle it with a towel.

Clean the terrapin

  1. Scrape off the outer skin from the legs.

  2. Open the terrapin and remove the gall bladder.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Pepper + sherrytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  3. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Terrapin
The main meat of the dish, whose texture becomes tender as it is simmered in water.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor and giving the meat a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Remove the gall bladder. The gall bladder holds bile, which tastes bitter. If it bursts, bile can spread onto the meat and spoil its flavor, so remove it intact and keep it away from the meat.

“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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