Home › Soups › Green Turtle Soup
Green Turtle Soup
sprig each of savory, marjoram, thyme, and sage 3 tablespoons butter + cup onion 3 tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon salt 2 cups brown stock 1 cup sherry Separate the green fat from the rest of the turtle. Cut Cook turtle and herbs in four cups of stock Melt butter; add onion, flour, salt, cayenne and two cups stock; boil five minutes; add turtle mixture; cook five minutes; add fat cubes. Pour into tureen, and garnish with lemon; add sherry. Serve.
This soup depends on an ingredient that is no longer legally or ethically obtainable, and the surviving text cannot be followed as a procedure.
- The green turtle is protectedChelonia mydas, the green sea turtle, is listed on CITES Appendix I and is protected in the United States under the Endangered Species Act (listed as threatened or endangered depending on the population). Buying, importing, killing or possessing it is an offence in most of the world, and there is effectively no legal supply outside a few narrow local exceptions.
- Farmed and "mock" substitutes are not equivalentTinned turtle meat still sold in a few markets is frequently of uncertain origin, and sea turtle flesh is a known cause of chelonitoxism, a poisoning for which there is no specific antidote. Freshwater snapping turtle is a different animal with different fat and gelatin behaviour, and does not stand in for this dish.
- If you want a soup of this characterUse a current recipe for mock turtle soup or a clear calf's-head or oxtail consommé. Those were the standard Victorian substitutes and they are what the flavour profile here — brown stock, sweet herbs, cayenne, sherry — was really built around.
- What the "green fat" wasThe prized part of the turtle was the gelatinous green-tinged fat lying beneath the shell, cut in cubes and added at the very end so it stayed intact. Period recipes made much of the fat as well as the meat.
- Sherry off the heatOne detail worth carrying to any brown soup: the sherry goes into the tureen after the pot leaves the stove, as it does here, rather than being boiled in the pan.
- Herbs by the sprigSavory, marjoram, thyme and sage a sprig each falls within the nineteenth-century "sweet herb" range. The recipe does not say to bundle them, though tying them or bagging them in muslin makes them easy to lift out.
Green turtle soup was the great luxury soup of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on both sides of the Atlantic, live turtles being shipped north from the Caribbean and kept in tanks at hotels and clubs until wanted. It appeared at civic banquets and Lord Mayor's dinners so reliably that turtle soup became shorthand for municipal extravagance, and its expense produced mock turtle soup, made from a calf's head simmered until gelatinous, which imitated the texture of the turtle's green fat. Lowney's, a chocolate company's promotional cookbook, includes it in the soup chapter as a matter of completeness: a well-run American household of 1907 was expected to know the form of a formal dinner even if the turtle itself arrived from a tin. The heavy commercial harvest of that century is a direct cause of the species' protected status today.