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Turtle Soup From Beans

A bean soup with thyme, savory, parsley, butter, egg yolks, meatballs, lemon, and white wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and summer savory match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 214 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Turtle Soup From Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the black beans overnight.

  2. Boil the beans in 1 gallon of water until tender.

  3. Strain the beans through a colander and return the pressed beans to the pot.

Season and serve

  1. Tie thyme, summer savory, and parsley in a thin cloth and add to the pot.

  2. Stir in cold butter, salt, and pepper.

  3. Add the quartered egg yolks, force meat balls, sliced lemon, and white wine just 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. Thyme + summer savorytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together214 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Summer savory + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together241 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Beans + summer savorytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together39 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Black beans
Form the body of the soup and thicken it as they break down when pressed.
Cold butter
Stirred in at the end to add richness and a silky mouthfeel.
White wine
Adds acidity and a bright, lifted flavour to the finished soup.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Add a crumbly, rich texture and mellow richness to the soup.

The step that matters

Adding the cold butter off the heat. Stirring cold butter into hot soup emulsifies it gradually into a smooth, glossy finish. If the soup is boiling hard or the butter is melted first, it can separate and look greasy.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (thyme, summer savory, parsley, butter, pepper, egg, meat):

  1. Beansthe original
  2. Walnutfits about as well
  3. Lentilsfits about as well
  4. Chestnutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against thyme, summer savory, parsley, butter, pepper, egg, meat. 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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