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Green Turtle Soup

A soup made from a live turtle, broth, sherry, port, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sherry and port wine match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 132 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Green Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turtle

  1. Hang the turtle by its hind legs, cut off the head, and let it bleed for a day.

  2. Separate the two shells with a sharp knife and remove the intestines.

  3. Take all the meat from the shells, bones, and fins, and cut each shell into four pieces.

  4. Briefly plunge the fins and shells in boiling water to remove the horny skin.

Make the soup

  1. Brown 4 ounces of flour in ½ cup butter.

  2. Add the browned flour to 3 quarts of broth to thicken.

  3. Boil for 30 minutes and skim well.

  4. Add ½ pint of sherry wine, ⅓ cup of port wine, a pinch of red pepper, and the turtle roe.

  5. Boil for 10 minutes and skim again.

Serve

  1. Serve with slices of pared lemon on a plate.

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. Sherry + port winetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together132 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Wine + port winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together128 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + port winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,499 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Browned in butter, it thickens the broth into a rich, body-filled soup.
Butter
Carries the flour as it browns, adding nutty aroma and richness to the soup.
Sherry wine
Adds acidity and a complex, aromatic depth to the finished soup.
Port wine
Contributes sweetness and fruity depth that rounds out the savory broth.
Turtle roe
Adds richness and a concentrated flavor from the eggs during the final simmer.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in butter. Flour cooked in fat must be stirred until it turns the desired color; underbrowned flour leaves raw, pasty flavor and weak color, while overbrowned flour turns bitter and loses thickening power.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, sherry, wine, port wine, pepper, roe):

  1. Figfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Grapefits about as well
  4. Plumfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sherry, wine, port wine, pepper, roe. 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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