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Green Turtle Soup

A soup made from turtle meat, stock, butter, onion, ham, garlic, flour, tomatoes, spices, wine, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Green Turtle Soup

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turtle

  1. Cut the head off the turtle and let it bleed overnight.

  2. Open the shell, remove entrails, and clean the liver, heart, and meat.

  3. Skin the feet and place them in boiling water for 2 minutes.

  4. Boil the feet in hot water until tender.

  5. Prepare soup stock the day before and reserve 3 pints.

Make the soup base

  1. Brown the butter in a pan.

  2. Add the chopped onion, ham, and garlic to the pan and cook until browned.

  3. Stir in the flour until smooth.

  4. Add the soup stock, canned tomatoes, red pepper, nutmeg, salt, and thyme.

  5. Cool for 15 minutes.

  6. Strain into another saucepan.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the turtle meat cut into pieces and cook until tender.

  2. Stir in the Madeira or sherry wine and lemon juice.

  3. Skim the grease off the top.

  4. Slice the lemon and add to the soup.

  5. Cook for 10 more minutes.

  6. Pour into a tureen 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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Garlic + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

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

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, which becomes tender through long simmering in the soup.
Soup stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour of the whole soup.
Butter
Adds richness and a browned, nutty aroma at the start of the base.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks, giving it body.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty depth to the base.
Canned tomatoes
Adds acidity and body, rounding out the soup's flavour.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour until smooth. Flour lumps form if it meets hot liquid unevenly. Stirring it into the fat and aromatics until smooth lets starch disperse so the soup thickens evenly.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, ham, garlic, flour, tomato, pepper):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, ham, garlic, flour, tomato, 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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