Home › The Principles of Cookery › Turtle Soup, from Tinned Turtle
Turtle Soup, from Tinned Turtle
When the turtle is not sent alive to its destination, it is killed as soon as it is caught put into tins hermetically sealed and then used for making soup. In this case the stock should be prepared and seasoned as for turtle soup, and the tinned meat, which is in a jelly, should be cut up and stewed in the stock. Turtle soup thus prepared requires to be seasoned rather highly, and a few mushrooms or truffles should be used in the flavouring, in order to take away the taste of the tin. Probable cost uncertain. Sufficient for five or six quarts of soup.
This entry assumes a commodity that no longer legally exists. The points below explain why, and what the instructions tell us about how the tinned product behaved.
- The turtle itselfThe animal meant here is the green turtle, Chelonia mydas, along with other marine turtles taken in the West Indian and Indian Ocean fisheries. All sea turtle species are now listed on CITES Appendix I and protected under national law across most of the world; there is no legal commercial source for the meat, tinned or otherwise, and possession is an offence in many jurisdictions.
- No canning data survivesThe recipe relies on tins packed at the point of capture by nineteenth-century methods, with no stated process time, temperature or acidity. Low-acid meat in a hermetically sealed tin is precisely the substrate for Clostridium botulinum, and period canning failures did occur.
- Freshwater turtles are not a substituteSnapping turtle and other freshwater species are regulated by state and provincial licence where they are taken at all, and carry their own contaminant advisories. Substituting them does not make this entry usable; a current recipe with modern handling guidance should be used instead.
- What "in a jelly" meansThe tinned meat was set in gelatine, of the kind associated with the calipash and calipee, the cartilaginous layers next to the upper and lower shell, though the jelly may equally be the natural set of the canned meat's own juices. The gelatinous quality was much prized, and the recipe accordingly directs only that the meat be cut up and stewed in the stock rather than given longer cooking.
- The taste of the tinThe direction to season highly and add mushrooms or truffles suggests that early tinplate and its solder could leave a metallic taint. Lacquered linings introduced later reduced the problem.
- ScaleFive or six quarts is a large quantity by household standards. Turtle soup was strongly associated with civic and formal dinners; the book gives no smaller version here.
- Cost "uncertain"Cassell's normally gives a probable cost. Here it declines to, which may reflect a trade in imported live turtles and tins whose prices fluctuated.
Turtle soup was the defining luxury of English public dining from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth, and specifically of the City of London: aldermanic and Lord Mayor's dinners were so associated with it that "turtle" became shorthand for civic gluttony in the satirical press. Live green turtles were shipped from the Caribbean and kept in tanks at inns and hotels until wanted, which is the situation this entry contrasts itself against — tinned turtle was the later, more portable option, and generally taken to be the cheaper one, though the entry itself declines to price it; Cassell's treats it as a legitimate but slightly inferior expedient. The mock turtle soup that appears alongside it in Victorian books, built on a calf's head to imitate the gelatinous texture, existed because the real thing was said to be beyond a good many kitchens even then. Commercial turtle fishing collapsed populations across the tropics through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the international trade was closed by CITES protections from the 1970s onward, which is why an entry that was once merely expensive is now simply obsolete.