Skip to main content
Main

Turtle Soup

A soup made from a hard‑shelled turtle, bacon or ham, vegetables, and a cream‑flour thickener.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turtle

  1. Kill the turtle the evening before use, dress it, and soak in salt water overnight.

  2. Boil the turtle in enough water to make soup, allowing for evaporation.

  3. Add salt and cook until tender, along with the bacon or ham.

  4. Remove all the meat and set aside to cool.

Make the soup

  1. Chop the assorted vegetables, parsley, carrot tops, onion tops, and celery tops finely.

  2. Mince the meat and combine it with the chopped vegetables.

  3. Boil the mixture for 10 minutes.

  4. Make a thickening by mixing the sweet cream and flour, then pour it into the boiling soup.

  5. Cook for an additional minute and serve.

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 + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Turtle
Forms the main body of the soup and supplies the meat for the bowl.
Bacon or ham
Adds savory, smoky fat and salty flavor to the broth.
Sweet cream
Adds richness and body to the soup once combined with the thickening.
Flour
Thickens the soup when mixed with cream and stirred into the boiling liquid.

The step that matters

Adding the cream and flour thickening. Flour mixed directly into hot liquid clumps. Blending it smoothly with the cream first lets the starch disperse evenly, so it thickens the soup without lumps.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, parsley, carrot, celery, cream, flour):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, parsley, carrot, celery, cream, flour. 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.

More turtle soup recipes

Mock 441Green 33Clear 6 See all 139 →

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesCelery StewCelery Stew25 recipesCelery CroquettesCelery Croquettes16 recipes