Skip to main content
Main

Green Turtle Soup

A soup made from turtle meat, herbs, onions, and spices, thickened with flour and served with optional eggs or meatballs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 the coarser parts of the meat and bones.

  2. Add 4 quarts of water, the turtle parts, herbs, onions, pepper, and salt to a large pot.

  3. Stew slowly for 4 hours without letting it stop boiling.

  4. Strain the soup.

Finish the soup

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

  2. Thicken the soup with brown flour.

  3. Return the soup to the pot.

  4. Simmer gently for 1 hour.

Add garnish and serve

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

  2. If there are no eggs in the turtle, prepare force-meat balls: mix 6 tablespoons of finely chopped turtle meat with the yolk of 2 hard-boiled eggs, 1 tablespoon of butter, cayenne, mace, ½ teaspoon of sugar, and a pinch of salt; bind the mixture with a beaten egg; shape it into small balls; dip the balls in egg and powdered cracker; fry the balls in butter; and add them to the soup before serving.

  3. Add lemon juice and Madeira to the soup and stir well.

  4. 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. 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. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 gelatinous body of the soup.
Green fat (in the method)
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the broth.
Brown flour
Thickens the soup, giving it body.
Madeira
Adds aroma and a rounded, slightly sweet depth at the end.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich broth.

The step that matters

Stew slowly without a rolling boil. Gentle, continuous simmering for 4 hours extracts flavour and gelatin from the tough meat and bones while keeping the broth clear; a hard boil can toughen the meat and cloud the soup.

Swap the onion

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

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

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