Skip to main content
Main

Green Turtle Soup

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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. In a pot, add 4 quarts of water and the turtle parts.

Make the soup

  1. Stew the mixture for 4 hours with the herbs, onions, pepper, and salt.

  2. Ensure the mixture boils continuously during this time.

  3. After 4 hours, strain the soup.

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

  5. Thicken the soup with brown flour.

  6. Return the soup to the pot and simmer gently for another hour.

Finish and serve

  1. If there are eggs in the turtle, boil them separately for 4 hours and add them to the soup before serving.

  2. If there are no eggs, add force meat balls instead.

  3. Stir in the lemon juice and Madeira.

  4. Serve immediately.

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. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 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 bones that give the soup its body and rich flavour.
Brown flour
Thickens the soup as its starch swells when heated in liquid.
Madeira
Adds sweetness and aromatic depth when stirred in near the end.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, heavy flavour of the soup.

The step that matters

Keep the stew at a continuous boil for 4 hours. A steady boil over the long simmer breaks down tough turtle meat and bones and extracts their gelatin and flavour. Letting it drop below a simmer stalls this, leaving the meat tough and the broth thin.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Kalefits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

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

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes