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Green Turtle Clear Soup

A clear soup made from turtle stock, egg white, and lemon, served with wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,157 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Green Turtle Clear Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Clarify the stock

  1. In a saucepan, mix the shell and egg white with cold water.

  2. Pour the cold turtle soup stock into the saucepan.

  3. Heat the saucepan over medium heat, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking.

  4. Allow the soup to gently boil until the egg forms a thick scum on the surface and the soup is clear underneath.

  5. Strain the soup through a folded towel in a colander, letting it run through slowly without squeezing.

Serve

  1. If the soup has cooled, reheat it and season to taste.

  2. Serve hot with lemon and wine.

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 + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Egg + winetop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptenal (green).

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Egg white and shell
Egg white and shell collect impurities as they rise and set, clearing the soup.
Turtle soup stock
Forms the base of the soup, which is clarified to become clear.

The step that matters

Allow the soup to gently boil until the egg forms a thick scum. Boiling vigorously can break up the egg raft and cloud the soup. A gentle simmer lets the egg bind impurities into a raft that can be strained off cleanly, leaving the soup clear.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, wine):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Grapefits about as well
  3. Applefits less well
  4. Plumfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, wine. 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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