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Stewed Turtle
Make a stew of the turtle and add all the ingredients used in the turtle-soup, except wine and lemons.--Mrs. D.
This is a cross-reference rather than a standalone recipe: it sends you back to the book's turtle-soup entry and tells you to leave out the wine and lemon. Everything hinges on what that soup contained and on what kind of turtle you can legally and safely obtain.
- What the soup base meansPeriod turtle soups of this type are generally built on a rich meat stock thickened with butter and flour and seasoned with onion, mace, cloves, herbs and cayenne, sometimes with forcemeat balls and sliced hard-boiled egg; check the book's own turtle-soup entry for what Mrs. D. actually intended. Dropping the wine and lemon removes the sharp, aromatic finish and leaves a plain brown stew.
- Species and legality firstAll sea turtles, the green turtle included, are protected under the Endangered Species Act and CITES; they cannot be bought, sold or eaten. Diamondback terrapin, the Chesapeake luxury of this book's era, is closed to harvest or restricted in a number of Atlantic states. In practice, legally farmed or licensed-harvest snapping turtle is the usual available option, and rules vary by state.
- SalmonellaTurtles carry Salmonella at high rates. Treat the raw meat like raw poultry, keep it away from other foods, and bring the finished stew to a full simmer throughout rather than serving anything pink at the bone.
- Cooking timeTurtle is dense connective tissue and does not behave like chicken. Two to three hours at a bare simmer is normal before the meat gives; rushing it produces something rubbery that no amount of further boiling will fix.
- Calipash and calipeePeriod turtle recipes assume the greenish fat under the upper shell (calipash) and the yellow gelatinous meat from the lower (calipee) go into the pot. These are what gave old turtle dishes their body. Modern packaged turtle meat is boneless muscle only, so a stew made from it will need extra gelatin from a veal knuckle or a long-reduced stock.
- Mock turtle as the practical optionA calf's head, or veal shank, simmered in the same spiced brown gravy is the historical mock-turtle substitute; dark-meat chicken is a modern stand-in that will give a broadly similar stew.
- YieldMrs. D. gives none. Reckon on 1 lb of turtle or substitute meat plus about a quart of stock serving four as a main course.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, is full of entries like this one: a signature, a single sentence, and an assumption that the reader already knows the longer recipe a few pages back. Turtle needed no explanation in the tidewater South. Snapping turtles came out of farm ponds and rivers, and diamondback terrapin from the brackish marshes of the Chesapeake, where they were said to have been cheap enough in the early nineteenth century to be fed to labourers ather than documented practice efore fashionable restaurants in Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York drove prices to extraordinary heights and hunted the population into collapse, a peak and crash usually placed in the 1890s and the early twentieth century. Turtle soup was the dress version, laced with Madeira or sherry and sharpened with lemon; the stew here is the same pot without the expensive finish, the everyday form of a grander dish.