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Turtle Soup

A soup made from turtle meat, ham, herbs, lemon, eggs, and wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turtle

  1. Kill and clean the turtle.

  2. Soak the turtle in cold water.

  3. Wash the shell.

  4. Scrape the shell.

  5. Place the turtle in a soup kettle with 2 gallons of water and the hock of ham at 8 AM.

  6. Boil the soup briskly.

  7. Once the shell is hot, remove it.

  8. Scrape out the meat.

  9. Return the meat to the kettle.

Season and thicken the soup

  1. Add the bag of thyme and sweet marjoram, along with salt, pepper, and allspice.

  2. Add the juice of one lemon.

  3. Remove the hock.

  4. Mix brown flour with some soup to thicken, stirring constantly until it boils.

  5. Remove the herb bag.

  6. Pour the soup into a tureen.

  7. Add 1 pint of sherry or Madeira wine.

  8. Add the lemon slices with the yolks of 4 hard-boiled eggs.

Make the cakes and serve

  1. Slice the lemon.

  2. Chop some turtle meat.

  3. Season the meat with salt and pepper.

  4. Mix the meat with bread crumbs.

  5. Form the mixture into small cakes.

  6. Fry the cakes in butter.

  7. Place the fried cakes on top of the soup.

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

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

  2. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,083 recipes

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

  4. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Turtle
Provides the main body of meat and the rich, gelatinous character of the soup.
Brown flour
Thickens the soup as its starch swells and gelatinizes when heated with liquid.
Sherry or madeira wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the finished soup.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Enrich the soup with a creamy texture and richness.
Bread crumbs
Bind the chopped meat so it holds its shape in the cakes.
Butter
Browns the cakes in the pan and adds fat and flavour.

The step that matters

Thickening with brown flour. Flour must be mixed with some hot soup first and stirred constantly until it boils, so the starch swells evenly; added dry or left unstirred, it forms lumps and the soup stays thin or grainy.

Swap the allspice

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, pepper, lemon, egg, bread, butter, sherry):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, pepper, lemon, egg, bread, butter, sherry. 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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