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Genuine Turtle Soup
For a turtle weighing thirty to thirty-five pounds, use five pounds of beef, five pounds of veal, and one pound of ham; butter the bottom of the soup-pot; arrange the meat in the pot in layers, with four onions, one carrot, eighteen cloves, one teaspoonful of pepper, and one full pint of water; put the pot upon a brisk fire, stirring frequently until the entire pot is covered with a brown glaze; then fill the pot with the water in which the turtle was boiled; if this does not fill the pot add more water; then put the pot on a slow fire, and let it cook very slowly for two hours; skim well, thenstrain off this liquor, adding one quart of water to the meat, boil it another hour, and then strain into the other liquor.
This is the stock base for the great nineteenth-century turtle soups, and it cannot legally or ethically be made today. The points below explain what the recipe assumes and why it is now closed to us.
- The turtle itselfA thirty-to-thirty-five-pound turtle in an American cookbook of this period most likely means sea turtle, probably the green turtle, Chelonia mydas, though the weight is small for a mature animal and freshwater turtles were also used. If it is green or hawksbill turtle, both are listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and Appendix I of CITES; possession, sale and import are prohibited, and there is no lawful source.
- Diamondback terrapin is not a substituteThe other turtle of period cookery, the diamondback terrapin, was hunted to commercial collapse and is now protected or regulated in many states of its range. Farmed snapping turtle is sold in some markets, but it will not behave like a large sea turtle.
- Sea turtle flesh carries its own hazardsBeyond legality, green and hawksbill turtle meat has been repeatedly implicated in chelonitoxism, a poisoning that cooking does not neutralise, and the fat accumulates heavy metals and organochlorines. This is not a food that long simmering makes safe.
- The recipe is only half the dishWhat is given here is the stock: browned meats glazed in the pot, then let down with the turtle's own cooking liquor. The turtle meat itself, and the wine, forcemeat balls and lemon that finish a classic turtle soup, are not given here.
- If you want the flavourMock turtle soup, built on calf's head or veal and heavily herbed, was developed as a cheaper stand-in for the real thing and is common in books of the period. Use a current recipe for it.
Turtle soup was the grandest thing an English or American kitchen could serve, in a vogue running from about the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth. Live green turtles were shipped north from the Caribbean in the holds of sailing vessels, kept in tanks at the great hotels, and dispatched to order; a turtle dinner was a civic event, and turtle soup appeared at Lord Mayor's banquets and presidential tables alike. The scale of this recipe — eleven pounds of beef, veal and ham used merely to build the broth around the turtle — suggests it was written for a hotel or a large household with a professional cook, not for a family of four. Demand of this kind is what drove the American diamondback terrapin toward collapse by the early twentieth century, with the green turtle's decline generally dated later, and it is why mock turtle soup, with its calf's head standing in for the real thing, long outlived the dish it imitated.