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Canned Turtle Soup

A soup made with canned turtle, vegetable broth, eggs, Madeira wine, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,395 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Canned Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Place the vegetable soup in a saucepan with hot water underneath and simmer for 10 minutes.

  2. Add the turtle, salt, cayenne pepper, allspice, and the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs, mash them smooth, and boil for a few minutes.

  3. Cream the butter and flour together, then stir into the soup until it thickens.

Finish and serve

  1. Warm the Madeira wine and pour it into the soup just before serving.

  2. Serve with thin slices of lemon, removing the seeds, in each bowl.

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. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Allspice + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,302 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 body of the soup.
Hard-boiled eggs
Their mashed yolks thicken the soup and add richness.
Madeira wine
Adds a sweet, aromatic depth poured in just before serving.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps carry flavour in the thickened soup.
Browned flour
Thickens the soup when creamed with butter and stirred in.

The step that matters

Stirring in the butter and flour mixture. Flour must be fully blended with butter before it hits the hot soup, otherwise it clumps instead of thickening evenly. Keep the soup simmering while stirring so the starch swells and sets smoothly.

Swap the allspice

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, madeira wine, pepper, butter, 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.

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