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Greek Turtle Soup

A soup made from turtle meat, bones, herbs, onions, lemon juice, Madeira, and optional eggs or meatballs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Greek Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turtle

  1. Remove the entrails from the turtle and cut up the coarser parts of the meat and bones.

  2. Add 4 quarts of water and the turtle parts to a large pot.

Stew and strain

  1. Stew for 4 hours with the herbs, onions, pepper, and salt.

  2. Keep the mixture boiling slowly throughout the cooking time.

  3. After 4 hours, strain the soup.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the finer parts of the turtle and the green fat, which has been simmered for 1 hour in 2 quarts of water.

  2. Thicken the soup with brown flour.

  3. Return the soup to the pot and simmer gently for another hour.

  4. If there are eggs in the turtle, boil them separately for 4 hours.

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

  6. If no eggs are present, add force meat balls instead.

  7. Stir in the lemon juice and Madeira.

  8. Serve immediately.

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. Lemon + peppertop 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 + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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
Provides the meat and bones that form the body and flavour of the soup.
Brown flour
Thickens the soup as it is stirred in, giving it body.
Green fat
Adds richness and a rounded, mellow flavour to the soup.
Madeira
Adds aroma and a sweet, fortified wine note that lifts the soup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, heavy broth.

The step that matters

Keep the mixture boiling slowly throughout the cooking time. A gentle, steady simmer extracts flavour and gelatin from the meat and bones without toughening the meat. A hard rolling boil can cloud the broth and break up the meat.

Swap the onion

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

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

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