Skip to main content
Main

Green Turtle Soup

A soup made from turtle meat, onions, herbs, lemon juice, Madeira, and thickened with brown flour, served with optional eggs or meatballs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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.

  2. Cut up the coarser parts of the meat and bones.

Make the soup

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

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

  3. Strain the soup.

  4. Simmer the green fat for 1 hour in 2 quarts of water.

  5. Add the finer parts of the turtle and the green fat.

  6. Thicken the soup with brown flour.

  7. Return the soup to the pot.

  8. Simmer gently for another hour.

Add garnish and serve

  1. If there are eggs in the turtle, boil them separately for 4 hours.

  2. Add the eggs to the soup before serving.

  3. If not using eggs, add force meat balls instead.

  4. Stir in the lemon juice and Madeira.

  5. 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 meat, bones and green fat that form the body and rich flavour of the soup.
Brown flour
Thickens the soup, giving it a fuller, smoother body as it cooks.
Madeira
Adds a sweet, fortified wine aroma and depth to the finished soup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, heavy flavour of the soup.

The step that matters

Keep the soup at a steady simmer while it stews. Stewing slowly for four hours at a gentle boil lets collagen in the bones and meat break down into gelatin, giving body and tenderness. A hard boil can toughen meat and cloud the broth.

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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMeat CroquettesMeat Croquettes52 recipesMeatballsMeatballs37 recipesMince MeatMince Meat37 recipes