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Clear Turtle Soup

A clear soup made from turtle meat, bones, onions, spices, herbs, lemon, mushrooms, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,232 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Clear Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Cook the turtle meat until done.

  2. Cool the meat and remove the bones.

  3. Return the bones to the pot with onions, spices, herbs, lemon rind, and mushrooms or their liquor.

  4. Strain the soup into a jar.

  5. Let it sit for 30 minutes to skim off the fat.

  6. Pour the clear soup through a fine strainer into a large saucepan.

Clarify and finish

  1. Add lemon juice, egg whites mixed with cold water, and chopped raw beef.

  2. Heat until the egg is cooked.

  3. Strain through a napkin in a strainer twice.

  4. Add pieces of turtle and cooked eggs or egg-balls.

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. Mushroom + beeftop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Onion + beeftop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Meat + beeftop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,533 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Meat + mushroomtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,423 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Coagulate as they heat, trapping particles so the soup clears.
Raw beef
Adds meaty flavour and, with the egg whites, gathers impurities for clarifying.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the soup.
Turtle meat
Forms the body of the soup and provides its main texture.

The step that matters

Heating the egg white and beef mixture. Heat must rise gently so the egg whites set slowly and collect impurities; if it boils hard, they break up and the soup turns cloudy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, onion, mushroom, egg, beef):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Pumpkinfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, onion, mushroom, egg, beef. 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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