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Terrapin Brown Stew

A stew of terrapin, onion, cloves, mace, celery seed, bread, spices, browned flour, butter, allspice, wine, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Terrapin Brown Stew

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the terrapins with onion, cloves, mace, and celery seed until cooked.

  2. Add bread, black pepper, and salt, then transfer to a chafing dish.

  3. Mix in browned flour, butter, and allspice, then boil until thick.

  4. Add wine.

  5. Serve with lemon juice.

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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  3. Clove + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Terrapins
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through long boiling.
Browned flour
Thickens the liquid into a rich, body-filled stew as it boils.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, rounding out the flavour of the stew.
Bread
Adds body and helps give the stew a thicker, softer texture.
Wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the finished stew.

The step that matters

Boil until thick. Boiling reduces the liquid and lets the flour fully thicken it. Stopping too early leaves a thin stew, while boiling too hard can scorch the bottom and dry out the meat.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, clove, celery, bread, pepper, flour, butter):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, clove, celery, bread, pepper, flour, butter. 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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