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Turtle or Terrapin Stew

A stew made from turtle or terrapin meat seasoned with pepper, salt, cayenne, egg, spices, lemon juice, and wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Turtle or Terrapin Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Clean the turtle or terrapin thoroughly.

  2. Parboil the meat until partially cooked, then remove and chop into pieces.

Season and stew

  1. Season the meat with pepper, coarse sea salt, cayenne pepper, chopped hard-boiled egg, spices, lemon juice, and wine.

  2. Stew the mixture until the meat is fully cooked and tender.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + champagnetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Meat + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,777 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + champagnetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together280 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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 or terrapin meat
Forms the body of the stew and becomes tender through slow stewing.
Hard-boiled egg
Adds body and richness to the stew as it is mashed into the mixture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich meat.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma that deepen the flavour of the stew.

The step that matters

Parboil the meat. Parboiling partly cooks the meat before it is stewed, so it can be chopped cleanly and then finish cooking evenly and tenderly in the stew.

“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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