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Green Turtle Soup

A soup made from turtle meat, onions, herbs, and water, thickened with flour and flavored with lemon juice and Madeira.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Green 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, the turtle parts, herbs, onions, pepper, and salt to a large pot.

  3. Stew for 4 hours without letting it stop boiling.

Strain and thicken

  1. Strain the soup.

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

  3. Thicken the soup with brown flour.

  4. Return it to the pot and simmer gently for another hour.

Finish and serve

  1. Boil the eggs separately for 4 hours.

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

  3. If there are no eggs, add force meat balls.

  4. Stir in the lemon juice and Madeira.

  5. Mix well 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. 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. Onion + meattop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,364 recipes

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

  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).

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 gelatinous body that gives the soup its character and richness.
Brown flour
Thickens the soup by swelling in the hot liquid and binding it into a body.
Madeira
Adds sweetness and aromatic depth to the finished soup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, heavy broth.

The step that matters

Thicken the soup with brown flour. Flour must be stirred in so it disperses without lumps; added to boiling liquid, it can clump, and it needs the simmer afterward to cook out its raw taste and reach full thickness.

Swap the onion

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

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

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