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Terrapin Brown Stew

A stew of terrapin cooked with onion, cloves, mace, celery seed, bread, spices, browned flour, butter, wine, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Terrapin Brown Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Boil the terrapins with the onion, cloves, mace, and celery seed.

  2. Add the bread, black pepper, and coarse sea salt.

  3. When nearly done, transfer to a chafing dish.

  4. Mix in the browned flour, butter, and allspice.

  5. Boil until thick, then add the wine.

Serve

  1. Serve with lemon juice.

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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Clove + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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 that the stew is built around.
Browned flour
Thickens the stew as it boils, giving it body and a toasted flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, smoothing the texture of the thickened stew.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the finished stew.

The step that matters

Boil until thick, then add the wine. Flour thickens only when it has been boiled long enough to swell its starch, so the stew must reach a full boil before the wine is added. Adding wine too early or stopping the boil short leaves the sauce thin and can dilute its flavour.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, clove, celery, bread, pepper, flour, butter):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, clove, celery, bread, pepper, flour, butter. 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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