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Turtle Soup
Thoroughly clean the turtle. Place in kettle and cover with cold water. Let it come to a boil and skim. Tie in a small bag one tablespoon of thyme, marjoram, and sweet basil; let it boil with the meat slowly for twenty minutes. Remove to the cooker for five or six hours. Use one radiator. Remove meat from bones and when cold cut and dice and return to the stock. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Brown some flour in oven, blend with butter and thicken the soup to the consistency of cream.
This is a fireless-cooker recipe for an ingredient that is now largely off-limits, held for hours at an unmeasured and falling temperature. The notes below explain the specific problems rather than offering a way around them.
- The turtle itselfThe turtle of American soup cookery was usually the green sea turtle or the diamondback terrapin. Green and other sea turtles are protected under the Endangered Species Act and listed by CITES, and terrapin harvest is prohibited or tightly restricted across most of its range. Freshwater snapping turtles are legal in some states under licence and closed seasons, but the recipe as printed gives no species, no size and no source.
- Salmonella and turtlesTurtles 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. Cleaning and butchering one in a domestic kitchen spreads that risk across surfaces and hands long before anything reaches the pot.
- Why the fireless cooker is the deeper problemA fireless cooker is an insulated box: the food is boiled on the range, then transferred to sit on a preheated soapstone or iron disc, with no further heat input. Temperature falls steadily from the moment the lid closes. Five or six hours of that with a large quantity of meat and stock means an unknown but substantial period in the range where bacteria multiply, and no thermometer anywhere in the instructions.
- "One radiator"The radiator is the heated stone or metal disc supplied with the cooker, brought to temperature on the stove and placed under the kettle. Recipes of this period specify one or two depending on how long the food must stay hot. It is a heat reservoir, not a heat source, and the distinction is the whole safety issue here.
- Browned flourFlour spread in a shallow pan and browned in the oven until nut-coloured was the standard thickener for dark soups and gravies. Browning destroys much of its thickening power, so a roux of browned flour needs noticeably more flour than a pale one to reach the "consistency of cream" called for.
- The herb bagOne tablespoon of thyme, marjoram and sweet basil, tied in a bag, is the period's bouquet garni for turtle; the wording leaves it unclear whether a tablespoon of each or of the mixture is meant. Dried herbs are presumably intended, since fresh would be several times the volume. The recipe does not say at what point the bag is taken out.
- If you want turtle soupUse a current recipe from a reliable source, working with a legally harvested and properly inspected species and a cooking method with verifiable temperatures.
Turtle soup was the grand dish of Anglo-American public dinners from the eighteenth century onward, when live green turtles were shipped north from the Caribbean and kept in cellars and tanks until wanted; terrapin stew filled the same role in Maryland and Philadelphia society. Its prestige is exactly why mock turtle soup exists at all, built from a calf's head to imitate the gelatinous texture of the real thing for households that could not obtain or afford a turtle. That this version appears under "Fireless Cookery" is the interesting part: the fireless cooker, an insulated box with preheated soapstone discs, was promoted heavily in the first decades of the twentieth century as a fuel-saving, labour-saving device, and cookbook writers set out to prove it could handle everything from oatmeal to the most ceremonial soup in the repertoire. Within a few decades both halves of the recipe had gone — the cooker displaced by reliable thermostatic ranges, and the turtle by conservation law.