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Turtle Soup

A savory soup made with turtle meat, onions, tomatoes, herbs, and claret wine, served with boiled egg and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup base

  1. Heat a pan and add the grease.

  2. Brown the chopped onions, shallots, parsley, and tomatoes.

  3. Add the pounded turtle meat and cook for 10 minutes.

  4. In a dry skillet, brown the flour.

  5. Add the browned flour and hot water to the turtle mixture.

  6. Tie the bay leaf, thyme, allspice, cloves, black pepper, and red pepper in a thin cloth and add to the soup.

  7. Let the soup boil slowly for 2 hours, scraping the bottom of the pot occasionally.

Serve

  1. In a soup tureen, place the hard-boiled egg quarters, sliced lemon, and claret wine.

  2. Pour the soup over the ingredients in the tureen when ready to serve.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Thyme + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,077 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

  4. Shallot + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,476 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Parsley + allspicetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Turtle meat
Provides the main protein and body of the soup.
Flour
Browned and stirred in, it thickens the soup and adds a toasty flavour.
Onions
Softened and browned, they build the savoury sweetness that forms the soup's base.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and colour, balancing the rich meat and browned flour.
Claret wine
Adds acidity and aroma when placed in the tureen before the soup is poured over.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in a dry skillet. Flour that is browned too quickly or too little will taste scorched or raw and will not thicken the soup evenly. Stirring constantly until it turns a uniform golden-brown gives both colour and a nutty flavour before it is added to the liquid.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, shallot, parsley, meat, flour, thyme, allspice):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, shallot, parsley, meat, flour, thyme, allspice. 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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