Turtle Soup
Kill the turtle at daylight in summer, the night before in winter, and hang it up to bleed. After breakfast, scald it well and scrape the outer skin off the shell; open it carefully, so as not to break the gall. Break both shells to pieces and put them into the pot. Lay the fins, the eggs and some of the more delicate parts by--put the rest into the pot with a quantity of water to suit the size of your family.
Add two onions, parsley, thyme, salt, pepper, cloves and allspice to suit your taste.
About half an hour before dinner thicken the soup with brown flour and butter rubbed together. An hour before dinner, take the parts laid by, roll them in brown flour, fry them in butter, put them and the eggs in the soup; just before dinner add a glass of claret or Madeira wine.--Mrs. N. Turtle Soup.
To one turtle that will weigh from four to five pounds, after being dressed, add one-half gallon water, and boil until the turtle will drop to pieces, then add: 2 tablespoonfuls allspice. 1 tablespoonful black pepper. 2 tablespoonfuls butter, and salt to the taste. When nearly done, put in a small handful pot marjoram, thyme and parsley tied together, and two large onions; when ready to come off, add two sliced lemons, one pint good wine, and a small quantity of curry powder; thicken with flour.--Mrs. D.
Turtle Soup.
To 2 1/2 quarts soup add: 1 ounce mace. 1 dessertspoonful allspice. 1 teaspoonful cloves. Pepper, black and cayenne, and salt to your taste. Tie up a bunch of parsley, thyme, and onion in a cloth, and throw into soup when boiling. When nearly done, thicken with two tablespoonfuls flour. To give it a good color. take one tablespoonful brown sugar and burn it; when burnt, add a wine glass of water. Of this coloring, put two tablespoonfuls in soup, and just before serving, add half a pint Madeira wine.--Miss H. W.
Three contributors' versions of the same dish, all of them beginning with a live turtle in the yard. The obstacles here are legal and biological rather than culinary.
- The species is the problemThe book does not say which turtle, and in tidewater Virginia in the 1870s it could as easily have been diamondback terrapin or sea turtle as snapper. All sea turtles are now protected under the Endangered Species Act and CITES, and diamondback terrapin harvest is closed or tightly restricted across most of its range. Buying, taking or possessing them is a criminal matter, not a matter of taste.
- Even legal turtles are regulatedWhere snapping turtle harvest is still permitted it is governed by season, size limits, licensing and often a ban on commercial sale. There is no way to follow this recipe without first establishing what is lawful where you are, and in many states the answer is nothing.
- Home slaughter and butchery"Hang it up to bleed" and "scald it well" describe a whole-animal dressing process the book assumes every reader has watched. It carries a real risk of injury from a snapping turtle's jaws and neck, which remain dangerous for a long time, and of contaminating the meat when the shell is broken up and the viscera opened.
- SalmonellaTurtles are a well-documented reservoir of Salmonella, which is why the sale of small pet turtles has been federally restricted in the United States since the 1970s. Handling shell, skin and gut contents in a domestic kitchen spreads it across every surface the carcass touches.
- Contaminant loadLong-lived freshwater turtles accumulate mercury, PCBs and organochlorine pesticides in fat and liver. Several state health departments issue consumption advisories for snapping turtle specifically, and this recipe boils the whole animal, shell and all, into the broth.
- The gallMrs. N. alone warns against breaking the gall, and the instruction assumes familiarity with whole-animal butchery. A ruptured gall bladder floods the meat with bile and no amount of seasoning recovers it.
- If you want the flavourUse a current recipe for mock turtle soup, or for a veal or beef shin soup finished with Madeira, mace and lemon. The spicing in Miss H. W.'s version, with burnt sugar for colour, transfers directly to those.
Turtle soup was the great luxury soup of the English-speaking Atlantic world from the mid-eighteenth century onward, and the Chesapeake was one of its supply centres: diamondback terrapin from the Virginia and Maryland marshes moved north to hotel kitchens in Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, where terrapin stew became a fixed item on formal menus. That commercial appetite, along with habitat loss, is generally credited with collapsing the terrapin population by the early twentieth century. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, which is why the same dish appears three times over three sets of initials with no attempt to reconcile them; the book records what particular households actually did. The seasoning is the period's standard turtle treatment throughout: mace, allspice, cloves, a bundle of pot herbs, burnt sugar for colour and a good deal of Madeira or claret at the end. The persistence of mock turtle soup, built from a calf's head, is the clearest evidence of how much that flavour was prized and how expensive the real thing had become.