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Green Turtle Soup

A broth made from turtle meat, onions, herbs, and spices, thickened with flour and served with fried meatballs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 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 turtle

  1. Remove the entrails from the turtle and cut up the coarser parts of the meat and bones.

  2. In a large pot, add 4 quarts of water, the turtle parts, onions, sweet herbs, pepper, and salt.

  3. Stew very slowly for 4 hours without letting it stop boiling.

  4. Strain the soup.

Make the soup

  1. Add the finer parts of the turtle and the green fat, which has been simmered for 1 hour in 2 quarts of water.

  2. Thicken the soup with brown flour.

  3. Return the soup to the pot and simmer gently for 1 hour.

Make the force-meat balls

  1. If there are eggs in the turtle, boil them separately for 4 hours.

  2. Add the boiled eggs to the soup before serving.

  3. If not, prepare force-meat balls by mixing chopped turtle meat, egg yolks, butter, cayenne, mace, sugar, and salt.

  4. Bind the mixture with a beaten egg.

  5. Shape the mixture into small balls.

  6. Dip the balls in egg.

  7. Coat the balls with powdered cracker.

  8. Fry the balls in butter.

  9. Add the force-meat balls to the soup.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in the lemon juice and Madeira.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Turtle
Provides the main meat and bones that build the body and flavour of the soup.
Brown flour
Thickens the soup as its starch swells when heated in the liquid.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the force-meat balls together.
Butter
Adds fat for frying the balls, giving them a golden crust and rich flavour.
Madeira
Adds a sweet, fortified wine aroma and depth to the finished soup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich soup.

The step that matters

Simmer without letting the pot stop boiling during the long stew. A slow, steady simmer over 4 hours breaks down the tough turtle meat and bones and draws out their gelatin and flavour. Letting it stop boiling can leave the meat tough and the broth weak.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, lemon, pepper, flour, egg, butter, sugar. 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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