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Green Turtle Soup

A soup made from turtle meat, herbs, onions, and spices, finished with lemon juice and served with fried egg yolk balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 19 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 ↓

Green Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup base

  1. Chop the entrails, bones, and coarse parts of the turtle meat.

  2. Place the chopped parts in a pot with 1 gallon of water, sweet herbs, onions, pepper, and salt.

  3. Cook slowly for 4 hours.

  4. Simmer the fine parts of the turtle and green fat in ½ gallon of water for 1 hour.

  5. Strain the first mixture.

  6. Add the second mixture after 4 hours of cooking.

  7. Thicken the soup slightly with browned flour.

  8. Simmer the soup for another hour.

Prepare the eggs and force-meat balls

  1. If there are eggs in the turtle, boil them in clear water for 3-4 hours.

  2. Mix the yolks of 2 hard-boiled eggs with chopped turtle meat, butter, and oyster liquor if available to make force-meat balls.

  3. Season the mixture with mace, cayenne, and sugar.

  4. Bind the mixture with a raw egg.

  5. Roll the mixture into small balls.

  6. Dip the balls in beaten egg.

  7. Coat the balls with rolled cracker.

  8. Fry the coated balls in butter.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the boiled eggs to the soup before serving.

  2. Add the juice of 1 lemon before serving.

  3. Drop the fried balls into the soup before serving.

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. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + oystertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  5. Egg + oystertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Turtle meat
Provides the main body, flavour and richness of the soup and the force-meat balls.
Browned flour
Thickens the soup slightly and adds a toasted, deeper colour and flavour.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Bind and enrich the force-meat balls with a smooth, creamy texture.
Raw egg
Binds the force-meat mixture so the balls hold together during frying.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich soup and balances its flavour.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour, and browns the outside of the fried balls.

The step that matters

Thicken the soup with browned flour. Flour must be cooked until browned and stirred in smoothly; added raw or in lumps it can taste pasty and leave the soup grainy, and it thickens only as the starch gelatinises in hot liquid.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, flour, lemon, egg, meat, butter, oyster):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, flour, lemon, egg, meat, butter, oyster. 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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