Turtle Soup
Make the red-legged turtle soup the same as terrapin. For green-turtle soup take; 3 pints clear white stock; 1 can green turtle; 1 onion; 2 tablespoonfuls butter; 1 tablespoonful flour; 1/2 teaspoonful salt; 1/4 teaspoonful paprika; 1 lemon; 1/2 glassful sherry; 6 cloves; 6 peppercorns; 1 bay leaf; 1 blade mace; 1 teaspoonful mixed sweet herbs.
If very fat, use only a small portion of it; cut this in dice and add at the last. Simmer the turtle meat for an hour in the stock, with the sweet herbs and spices tied loosely in a piece of cheesecloth. Slice the onion and cook it in the butter, but do not let it brown much; add the flour to the onion and butter, and stir until smooth.
Add this to the hot soup with the salt and paprika; let it simmer until thoroughly blended, then add the sherry and the fat meat. Serve with a very thin slice of lemon in each plate. Egg balls or hard-boiled egg-yolks cut in quarters may be served with the soup.
This is a canned-turtle recipe from the period when tinned green turtle was a staple of the grocer's luxury shelf. The central ingredient is no longer legally obtainable, and the notes below explain the terms and the obstacle rather than offering a route around it.
- The green turtle is protectedChelonia mydas, the green sea turtle, is listed under CITES and protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and equivalent laws elsewhere. Trade in its meat is prohibited, and the canned product this recipe depends on has not been lawfully sold for decades.
- The diamondback terrapin tooThe opening line sends the cook to a terrapin recipe. Diamondback terrapin populations collapsed under exactly this culinary demand; the species is regulated or fully protected across most of its range, and commercial harvest is banned in state after state.
- "Red-legged turtle"A market name of the period, probably applied to one of the cheaper freshwater turtles sold alongside true terrapin rather than to a single identifiable species. It was never a precise zoological term, and modern freshwater turtle harvest is likewise restricted in most jurisdictions.
- Snapping turtle is not a drop-inSnapping turtle, still farmed and sold in a few places, has different fat, gelatin and cooking behaviour, and is itself regulated in many states. A current, species-specific recipe should be used rather than this one.
- Why the fat is treated separatelyGreen turtle supplied prized gelatinous fatty matter -- the greenish calipash from the upper shell and the yellower calipee from the lower -- often valued above the lean meat, which is the likely reason the recipe reserves the fat, dices it and adds it only at the end. Nothing else supplies quite the same thing, so a close substitution is not available.
- Terms in the ingredient listA "glassful" of sherry here means a wine glass, conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so the half glass is roughly 1 fl oz, about 2 tablespoons. A blade of mace is one piece of the dried aril around a nutmeg. Egg balls were forcemeat-style balls of pounded hard-boiled yolk bound with raw yolk and flour, poached before serving.
- Mock turtle is the surviving lineThe nineteenth-century mock turtle soups, built on calf's head or veal knuckle for gelatinous body and finished the same way with sherry, lemon and spice, are the part of this tradition still open to a cook.
Green turtle soup was the defining luxury soup of the English-speaking table from the mid-eighteenth century onward, carried home by ships from the West Indies and later supplied from Florida and Central America; live turtles were kept in tanks at ports and hotels, and the soup became so bound up with civic banqueting that it was known as the dish of London aldermen. Canning changed its social range: by the time this book was compiled, tinned green turtle meant a hostess could produce the grand soup from a store cupboard, which is precisely the recipe printed here — stock, a tin, sherry, and a spice bag. The same industrial appetite that made the tin cheap emptied the nesting beaches, and both the green turtle and the American diamondback terrapin ended the century of their popularity as protected animals. What survives of the tradition, though now uncommon, is mock turtle, the calf's-head imitation devised to mimic the gelatinous texture, and which outlived the original.