Skip to main content
Main

Green Turtle Soup

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

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 and cut the coarser parts of the meat and bones.

Make the soup

  1. In a large pot, add 4 quarts of water and the turtle parts, then stew for 4 hours with the herbs, onions, pepper, and salt over low heat.

  2. After 4 hours, 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.

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

Finish and serve

  1. If eggs are present, boil them separately for 4 hours and add them to the soup before serving.

  2. If no eggs, add force meat balls.

  3. Stir in the lemon juice and Madeira, mix well, and serve hot.

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 + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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 bones that give the soup its body and savoury flavour.
Brown flour
Thickens the soup as its starch swells during simmering, giving it a fuller body.
Madeira
Adds sweetness and aromatic depth to the finished soup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, heavy flavour of the soup.

The step that matters

Simmering the soup after thickening. Once brown flour is added, the soup must simmer gently rather than boil hard. Vigorous boiling can break up the thickened body and scorch the flour on the bottom of the pot.

Swap the onion

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

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

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

More turtle soup recipes

Mock 441Green 33Clear 6 See all 139 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes