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Soup

Green Turtle Soup

A soup made from green turtle meat, bones and entrails, simmered with herbs, onions, lemon, wine and mock turtle eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
By Goff, May Perrin, [from old catalog] ed · From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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 stock

  1. Chop up the coarser parts of the turtle (directions for cooking turtle given in "Shell Fish") with the entrails and bones.

  2. Add to them four quarts of water, and stew four hours with the herbs, onions, pepper and salt. Stew very slowly, but do not let it cease to boil during this time.

  3. At the end of four hours strain the soup.

Finish the soup

  1. Add the finer parts of the turtle and the green fat, which has been simmered for one hour in two quarts of water.

  2. Thicken with browned flour, return to the soup pot, and simmer gently an hour longer.

  3. If there are eggs in the turtle, boil them in a separate vessel for four hours, and throw into the soup before taking it up.

  4. If not, put in mock eggs, then the juice of the lemon and the wine; beat up once and pour out.

Make the mock eggs

  1. For the mock eggs, rub the yolks of three hard-boiled eggs into a paste with a teaspoonful of butter, tried with one raw egg well beaten.

  2. Roll the paste into pellets the size and shape of turtle eggs, and lay in boiling water for two minutes before dropping into the soup.

Nutrition, whole recipe (rough)

140Calories
8 gProtein
6 gFat
16 gCarbs

Counts 5 of 6 ingredients. The other 1 aren't in our nutrition table and add nothing above, so the real totals are higher.

What these numbers assume: 5 portions
IngredientPortion assumedkcal
Egg1 large egg (50g)78
Onion1 medium (110g)44
Lemonjuice of 1 lemon (48ml)12
Black Pepper1 tsp ground (2.3g)6
Salt1 tsp (6g)0
Waternot in our table0

One typical portion per ingredient; the recipe's quantities are not counted. A rough guide only, not for medical or dietary planning.

By Goff, May Perrin, [from old catalog] ed. 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. See the original page.

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. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

  4. Onion + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and egg 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

Hard-boiled eggs
Their yolks form a paste that stands in for turtle eggs, giving the soup a rich, creamy texture.
Raw egg
Binds the mock egg paste so the pellets hold their shape in the soup.
Browned flour (in the method)
Thickens the soup, giving it body and a slightly toasted flavour.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, heavy broth.
Onions
Build savoury depth in the stock as they stew for hours.

The step that matters

Stew the stock slowly without letting it stop boiling. A gentle, continuous simmer over four hours extracts flavour and gelatine from the bones and meat, while a stall or a hard rolling boil would leave the stock weak or cloudy.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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