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Potage Tortue. — Turtle Soup.

A soup made from a live turtle, beef, veal, hens, stock, mushrooms, onions, parsley, bay leaves, thyme, and parsley roots.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Potage Tortue. — Turtle Soup.

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turtle

  1. Kill the turtle by cutting off its head and let it bleed overnight.

  2. The next day, remove the shell and intestines, keeping the green fat.

  3. Cut off the fins and saw the shells into 6-8 pieces.

  4. Boil the shell pieces, fins, and head in a large pot of water for a few minutes.

  5. Remove the thin shell from the pieces and boil them until tender.

  6. Remove bones from the turtle meat and let it cool.

Make the soup

  1. Put the bones back in the pot and reduce the broth to make turtle consomme.

  2. In another pot, combine beef, veal, hens, turtle meat, general stock, mushrooms, onions, parsley, bay leaves, thyme, and parsley roots.

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. Beef + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Mushroom + thymetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,557 recipes

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

  4. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  5. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Turtle
Provides the main meat and, through its bones and shell, the body of the consomme.
Leg of beef
Adds meaty depth and gelatin to the broth as it simmers slowly.
Knuckle of veal
Contributes gelatin, giving the stock body and a silky mouthfeel.
Hens
Add savory richness and body to the broth during long simmering.
Mushrooms
Add earthy umami flavour that deepens the savoury character of the soup.
Onions
Provide sweetness and aromatic base flavour as they cook down.

The step that matters

Reducing the consomme broth. Reducing concentrates flavour, but over-reducing can make the broth too salty or intense, and skimming matters because cooking-released fat and proteins cloud the clear consomme.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, veal, mushroom, parsley, thyme):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, veal, mushroom, 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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