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Terrapin

Terrapin stew made by boiling a terrapin, removing the shell, and cooking the meat with butter, red pepper, lemon juice, water, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Terrapin

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the terrapin

  1. Boil the terrapin for 2 hours until the skin on the legs peels off.

  2. Remove the terrapin from the shell and discard the gall-sac.

Stew

  1. In a pot, add the butter, red pepper, lemon juice, and enough water to stew.

  2. Pour in a dash of sherry and let it cook.

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. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  5. Pepper + sherrytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

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

What each ingredient does

Terrapin
Provides the main meat, whose connective tissue becomes tender with long cooking.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the stew.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, fatty broth.

The step that matters

Boiling the terrapin for 2 hours. Long boiling softens the collagen-rich connective tissue, so the skin loosens from the legs and the meat becomes tender. Stopping early leaves the skin stuck and the meat tough.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Plumfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Pineapplefits about as well
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, 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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