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To Make the Soup
Put a half pound of butter into a large soup pot, with a bouquet of the following herbs: Five sprigs of savory, five of thyme, four of basil, five of marjoram, and four bay leaves; place it for a few minutes over a moderate fire; be careful that it does not change color; then stir in very gradually one half of a pound of flour to form a roux, which keep stirring over the fire until it becomes tinged lightly; remove it from the fire and stir now and then until nearly cold; then add the stock, which should be at least six quarts; place it again over the fire and stir it until boiling; it must then simmer two hours. Pass it through a colander into a clean stewpan; add the turtle meat (which has been cut into squares); place the pan on the fire, where it will simmer until the meat is very tender; then add the green fat, and salt to taste; let it stew ten or fifteen minutes longer. When ready to serve add a very small teaspoonful of cayenne pepper, and two gills of Madeira wine to each tureenful.
Serve lemon cut in slices, separate.
This is the roux-and-stock base for a nineteenth-century turtle soup, and the turtle it calls for is the one animal in the recipe that cannot legally or ethically be bought today. The technique notes below are given for reading, not for shopping.
- The turtle is the problem"Green fat" is the trade term for the greenish gelatinous fat of the green sea turtle, Chelonia mydas — the species that made turtle soup famous and that the soup helped drive toward collapse. It is listed on CITES Appendix I and protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act; possession, import and sale are prohibited. All marine turtle species are similarly protected. There is no legal source.
- Do not substitute a wild turtleFreshwater snapping turtle was the historic American stand-in, and in some states it is still taken, but wild snapper carries a well-documented burden of mercury, PCBs and other accumulated contaminants, and a number of states issue advisories limiting or, for some waters, discouraging consumption. If you want this style of soup, work from a current recipe using a farmed or mock alternative.
- Quantities are banquet scaleHalf a pound of butter, half a pound of flour and six quarts of stock, plus the meat, make somewhere between sixteen and twenty-four servings depending on portion size. The Madeira is dosed per tureen rather than per pot, which suggests the soup was expected to be held and sent out in batches.
- "A moderate fire" for the rouxLow to medium — the instruction "be careful that it does not change color" is the whole point of the first stage. The herbs are being infused into the butter, and browning them at this stage gives a bitter, scorched note that two hours of simmering will not lift.
- Cooling the roux before the stock goes inStanding the roux until nearly cold, then adding liquid, is the old insurance against lumps: a cool roux disperses instead of seizing. Modern practice usually adds hot stock to hot roux in stages, which works equally well if you whisk.
- A gillHalf a cup, so "two gills of Madeira" is one cup per tureen — a generous hand. The wine goes in off the heat at service so the aromatics survive.
- The bouquetNineteen sprigs of herbs plus four bay leaves is a large bundle, appropriate to six quarts. Tie it rather than loose-strewing it; the recipe strains through a colander later, which will not reliably catch small fragments.
Turtle soup was the definitive luxury soup of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the green sea turtle was shipped alive from the Caribbean to London, Philadelphia and New York specifically to be turned into it. The "green fat" this recipe adds at the end was the prized part — a gelatinous fat lying beneath the shell, and the reason mock turtle soup, built from a calf's head, was so concerned with reproducing texture as well as flavor. Its appearance in a general household book is a sign of how far the dish had traveled down from civic banquets and aldermen's dinners into the aspirational middle-class repertoire, alongside the Madeira and the sliced lemon served separate that mark it as formal service. The trade that supported it was enormous and is one of the reasons the species is protected today; the recipe now reads as a document of what unregulated appetite could do to an animal.