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Turtle Roasted

Roasted turtle meat coated in egg and breadcrumbs, served with a clarified butter sauce made from turtle soup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Turtle Roasted

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Place the turtle meat in a stewpan with cold water and bring to a boil.

  2. If the meat is set, remove it from the heat.

Coat and roast

  1. Skewer the meat on a spit and coat it with egg.

  2. Sprinkle bread crumbs over the egg coating, repeating this process three times.

  3. Drizzle a little clarified butter over the turtle and secure the spit to the roasting spit.

  4. Roast for about 30 minutes.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Prepare the sauce by mixing some turtle soup with it after straining through a tammy.

  2. Serve the sauce on the plate with the turtle.

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

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

  2. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Meat + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

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

  4. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Turtle meat
Forms the main body of the dish, and its texture depends on how gently it is heated.
Eggs
Act as a binder that helps the bread crumbs stick to the meat.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned crust over the coated meat as it roasts.
Clarified butter
Adds fat that promotes browning and a rich flavor on the surface.
Turtle soup
Gives the sauce its concentrated savoury flavor.

The step that matters

Remove the meat once it is just set. Proteins in meat tighten and toughen when overheated, so stopping the cooking as soon as the meat sets keeps it tender and moist.

“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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