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Soup

Turtle Soup

A rich soup made by boiling turtle meat with ham hock, herbs, lemon, and sherry or Madeira wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turtle

  1. Kill and clean the turtle, then soak it in cold water.

  2. Wash and scrape the shell.

  3. Place the turtle in a soup kettle with two gallons of water and a hock of ham at 8 AM if serving at 3 PM. Boil briskly.

  4. Once the shell is hot, remove it, scrape out the meat, and return the meat to the kettle.

Make the soup

  1. At 11 AM, add the bag of thyme and sweet marjoram, along with 1 tablespoon of salt, pepper, and allspice.

  2. At 1 PM, add the juice of one lemon and remove the hock.

  3. Mix brown flour with some soup to thicken, then add it to the kettle, stirring constantly until it boils.

  4. Remove the bag of herbs, pour the soup into a tureen, and stir in 1 pint of sherry or Madeira wine.

Add the garnish and serve

  1. Slice the lemon and add it along with the yolks of four hard-boiled eggs.

  2. Chop some turtle meat, season with salt and pepper, mix with bread crumbs, and form into small cakes using the beaten yolks of two eggs.

  3. Fry the cakes in butter and place them on top of the soup before serving.

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. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  5. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Turtle
Provides the meat and body of the soup and the meat used for the fried cakes.
Brown flour (in the method)
Thickens the soup as it boils, giving it body.
Sherry or madeira wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth stirred in at the end.
Eggs
Yolks bind the turtle meat cakes and enrich the soup with their flavor and richness.

The step that matters

Thickening the soup with flour. Flour must be mixed smoothly with some hot soup first and stirred constantly until it boils; otherwise it clumps and does not thicken evenly, because starch only swells properly once heated in liquid.

Swap the allspice

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, pepper, lemon, egg, bread, butter, 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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