Name: Terrapin Steak
Ingredients: 1 terrapin; coarse sea salt; black pepper; butter

Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Terrapin Steak

Ingredients

1 terrapin
coarse sea salt
black pepper
butter

Directions

Prepare

Cut steaks from the terrapin.
Sprinkle the steaks with coarse sea salt and black pepper.
Place a few lumps of butter on the steaks.

Cook and serve

Broil the steaks on a grill until cooked.
Serve the steak very hot.

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.

Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Terrapin: Is the meat being cooked, forming the steaks that the whole dish is built on.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and helping the surface of the steaks brown.

“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.