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Turtle Sauce

A sauce made with turtle stock, ham or bacon, butter, flour, vegetables, herbs, spices, tomato pulp, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Turtle Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the ham, cut into small pieces, and fry for a few minutes.

  3. Add the sliced vegetables, herbs, and spices, and stir these ingredients over the fire for a few minutes.

  4. Add the flour and brown it carefully.

Simmer and finish

  1. Pour in the stock, tomato pulp, and sherry, and stir the sauce until it begins to boil.

  2. Move the saucepan to the side of the fire and let it simmer for 30 minutes.

  3. Strain the sauce and heat it 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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Thyme + tomatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,370 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,606 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Browned with the butter, it thickens the stock into a body-rich sauce.
Butter
Carries the fat that fries the ham and vegetables and carries their flavour into the sauce.
Turtle stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and supplies its main savoury flavour.
Ham or bacon
Frying releases savoury fat and flavour that season the whole sauce.
Tomato pulp
Adds acidity and body, balancing the richness of the stock and fat.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the flour. Flour cooked in fat gains flavour and colour, but it can scorch quickly. Scorched flour turns the sauce bitter and dark, so it must be stirred constantly over moderate heat.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, butter, flour, carrot, onion, parsley, thyme):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, butter, flour, carrot, onion, parsley, thyme. 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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