Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Terrapint

A stew of terrapin meat cooked with butter, flour, cayenne, sherry, soy sauce, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Stewed Terrapint

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the terrapins

  1. Plunge the terrapins in boiling water for 5 minutes.

  2. Remove them and let cool, then rub off the skin from the legs and neck.

  3. Carefully remove the undershell and liver, discarding the gall-bag.

  4. Reject the claws, head, and sac-bag; cut the remaining parts into neat pieces.

Stew and finish

  1. In a stew pan, stew the pieces for 30 to 45 minutes until tender.

  2. In a chafing dish, melt the butter and mix with flour, cayenne, sherry, soy sauce, and salt. Beat the mixture with a fork until hot, then add the terrapin pieces and any eggs.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Flour + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Pepper + sherrytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

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

Terrapins
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through slow stewing.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat, adding richness and smooth texture.
Flour
Thickens the butter and sherry mixture into a smooth, cohesive sauce.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stew until tender. Terrapin meat is tough and needs long, gentle simmering to break down its connective tissue; cutting the stew short leaves it chewy.

“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.

More stewed terrapin recipes

with Cream 5 See all 45 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes