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Turtle Soup

A soup made from turtle meat, ham, rice, and spices, simmered for several hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,108 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turtle

  1. Kill the turtle.

  2. Hang it up to bleed overnight.

  3. In the morning, carefully separate the shells without breaking the gall.

  4. Put the eggs, fins, and flesh into cold water.

  5. Remove the black skin from the fins.

Make the soup

  1. Boil the turtle in twice as much water as desired soup for 2 hours, skimming regularly.

  2. Add the ham and butter.

  3. Boil for 3 more hours.

  4. About 1 hour before finishing, add the rice, flour creamed with butter, onion, celery, thyme, cloves, and allspice.

  5. Cook for 1 more hour.

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. Thyme + clovetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Celery + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,193 recipes

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

  3. Celery + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  4. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Turtle
Forms the main body of the soup and supplies its rich meaty flavour and gelatinous texture.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty depth to the broth as it simmers for hours.
Rice
Thickens the soup slightly as its starch releases during the long simmer.
Flour
Thickens the soup when creamed with butter, giving it body and a smoother texture.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and helps the flour blend smoothly into the soup.

The step that matters

Skimming the turtle during the first 2 hours of boiling. Skimming removes foam and coagulated impurities that rise as the meat cooks. Leaving them in makes the broth cloudy and can give it an off flavour.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, butter, rice, flour, celery, thyme, clove):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, butter, rice, flour, celery, thyme, clove. 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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