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Green Turtle Soup

A soup made from turtle meat, onions, herbs, and spices, thickened with flour and served with optional eggs or meatballs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 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. Add 4 quarts of water, the turtle parts, herbs, onions, pepper, and salt to a large pot.

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

  4. Strain the soup.

Finish 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 it to the pot.

  4. Simmer gently for another hour.

Make the force meat balls and serve

  1. If there are eggs in the turtle, boil them separately for 4 hours and add them to the soup before serving.

  2. If not, prepare force meat balls: mix chopped turtle meat with the yolk of 2 hard-boiled eggs, butter, cayenne, mace, sugar, and salt.

  3. Bind with a beaten egg, shape into small balls, dip in egg and powdered cracker, and fry in butter.

  4. Add the force meat balls to the soup along with the lemon juice and Madeira.

  5. Stir well.

  6. 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 body of the soup.
Brown flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks, giving it a fuller body.
Madeira
Adds a rich, sweet, aromatic depth to the finished soup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, heavy broth.
Eggs
Bind the force meat balls so they hold their shape while frying.

The step that matters

Thicken the soup with brown flour. Flour must be cooked long enough in the hot liquid to lose its raw taste and to thicken evenly; adding it lumpy or too late leaves clumps and a floury flavour.

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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