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Baltimore Terrapin

A stew made from boiled terrapin meat seasoned with cayenne, black pepper, and salt, finished with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Baltimore Terrapin

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the terrapins

  1. Boil a pot of water.

  2. Add the terrapins and boil until the skin and toe-nails come off.

  3. Remove the meat and cut it up.

  4. Season the meat with cayenne, black pepper, and salt.

Stew and serve

  1. Place the meat in a stewpan with the liquor from the terrapins.

  2. Add ½ lb of butter mixed with 1 teaspoon of flour.

  3. Cover and stew gently until the meat is very tender.

  4. Serve hot in a deep dish.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

Butter and flour 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

Terrapins
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through long gentle stewing.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the stew a smooth, full texture and flavor.
Flour
Mixed with the butter to lightly thicken the stewing liquor.

The step that matters

Stew gently until the meat is very tender. Terrapin meat is tough and needs low, slow, covered cooking so collagen breaks down. Boiling hard or stopping early leaves the meat chewy.

“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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