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Turtle Soup

A soup made with turtle meat, eggs, cream, milk, butter, flour, and served with lemons and stewed tomatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the green fat into squares and set the squares on ice.

  2. Cut the rest of the meat into small pieces.

Make the soup

  1. Combine the stock, cream, and milk in a pot and bring the mixture to a boil.

  2. Add the meat and let it simmer.

  3. Mix the flour and butter until smooth, then stir the mixture into the soup.

Garnish and serve

  1. Make egg balls from the hard-boiled eggs, using the yolks of raw eggs to bind them.

  2. Place the egg balls and green fat in a tureen and pour the soup over them.

  3. Serve with lemons and stewed tomatoes.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Beef + meattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,533 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

Beef stock
Forms the liquid base of the soup, carrying the flavour of the other ingredients.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture to the soup.
Milk
Thins the soup and adds body with a mild, creamy sweetness.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it is cooked into the butter and liquid.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour, and combines with flour to form a thickening paste.
Hard-boiled eggs
Provide firm, mild-flavoured bulk for the egg balls.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour and butter into the soup. Flour needs to be fully blended into the fat and liquid before it goes in, otherwise it clumps and the soup will not thicken smoothly. Keep the soup hot and stir as it is added.

“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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