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Green Turtle Soup

A soup made from turtle meat, green fat, herbs, and a brown flour thickener, finished with lemon and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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. Let the turtle hang head down for 4–5 hours to bleed.

  2. Carefully separate the shells and remove the entrails whole.

  3. Clean the turtle meat.

  4. Boil the meat in water until the claws loosen. Place the claws in cold water for 2–3 minutes.

  5. Drain and cut the claws into small pieces.

Make the soup

  1. Add the pieces to the soup stock with sweet herbs, onion, salt, and pepper. Cook the soup slowly for about 3 hours.

  2. Strain the soup. Return the strained soup to the stove.

  3. Thicken the soup with a paste of browned flour and water. Simmer the soup for 30 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Add green fat, force-meat balls or cooked eggs, lemon juice, and sherry or Madeira. Serve 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.

  1. Pepper + lemontop 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. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lemon + sherrytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Claws and fleshy parts of the turtle
Provide the main meat and gelatinous body of the soup.
Browned flour
Thickens the soup as a paste with water and adds a toasted, deeper flavour.
Green fat
Adds richness and a rounded fatty mouthfeel to the finished soup.
Juice of 1 lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the rich soup and balances its fat.
Sherry or madeira wine
Adds aromatic depth and a light sweetness, rounding out the soup's flavour.

The step that matters

Thicken with the browned flour paste. Flour must be whisked smoothly into water before it goes into the soup, or it clumps. Simmering afterward cooks out the raw starch taste and lets the soup thicken evenly.

Swap the onion

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

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

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