Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This page describes collecting wild birds' eggs, shooting birds for specimens, or similar practices. These activities are now illegal under wildlife-protection laws, including the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and they contributed to the decline of the very species described.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › When Tarzan Entertains › Sea Turtle in Its Shell
Sea Turtle in Its Shell
Open turtle, save top shell. Remove edible parts. Scald legs and feet. Skin and trim off toenails. Remove bones and cut meat in small pieces. Fry 1 small onion in 1 tablespoon butter. Add 1 large chopped tomato and fry until tomato thickens. Add 1 teaspoon minced parsley, 1/4 teaspoon minced marjoram, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 dash nutmeg, 1 dash cinnamon, 1 cup diced salt pork, 1/4 cup melted butter, 1/4 cup lime juice and 1/4 cup sherry. Mix all with turtle meat. Clean turtle shell thoroughly. Place mixture inside. Cover with bread crumbs. Dot with butter and bake in the oven.
There's no reason why this shouldn't work with a 30pound snapper, too. Udder: The thought of eating a cow's udder makes you shudder, but by many Europeans they're preferred to tripe. In the Balkans, they're stuck full of cloves and roasted. Whale: Whale fin fritters for your Esquimaux guide every time-whale steaks okay, and also omelet of its brains. But be sure to strip away all excess blubber.
In the West Indies when a whale is tugged ashore, the lucky fisherman charges sixpence a turn for the kids to slide down it, before it's butchered and sold by the ton.
Wombat: The "common" wombat, as it's called, though we don't see so many of them around, is much like bear. In Australia, where you may meet one around any corner, it's either roasted or cooked after any good recipe for bear. Worms of Maguey: The finest snack bars in Mexico City, and there are some good ones, will fix you up a mess of roasted maguey worms or a bowl of them stewed. at any hour. And with a flourish of native pride in them, for these vegetarian grubs born in the heart of the century plant and only crawling out of it into the frying pan, are as much a passion with Mexican peasants and sophisticates as snails with your true Parisians.
Water Worms: Eaten raw by South Sea Islanders, who also fancy raw fish.
Yak: The marrow of the yak, or Grunting Cow, as it's also called, is very sweet. Its bright red tongue is salted. Zebra: Zebra meat does not run in stripes of light and dark inside, as its outside markings might suggest. Neither does it resemble stick candy in taste as much as it does in looks, although like all horse meat, it is definitely sweetish. It's delicate as a Shetland pony cutlet, and more flavorsome, since all wild animals have tastier meat than tame ones broken to harness. In the same way, savages, wild men, head-hunters and such, make more tasty morsels for cannibals than civilized men, such as missionaries, sewing machine, windmill, and Bible salesmen. Zebu: This East Indian cow with a hump is sacred and safe in its vegetarian home, but it's the standard beef in Brazil, where it's raised instead of other cattle because it stands the heat best.
This is a beach-camp preparation of a whole sea turtle, and it cannot be made today. Every sea turtle species is protected, and the remaining problems with the method are not small ones either.
- The animal is protected everywhereAll sea turtle species are listed under CITES Appendix I, and the species occurring in United States waters are listed under the Endangered Species Act. Taking, killing, possessing, or selling one — or its shell, eggs, or meat — is a federal offence, and comparable bans apply across most of the world.
- The suggested substitute is regulated tooThe closing line offering a thirty-pound snapping turtle is not a free pass. Common snapping turtle harvest is licensed, seasonal, or prohibited outright depending on the state, and alligator snapping turtles are protected in most of their range.
- ChelonitoxismSea turtle meat periodically carries chelonitoxin, a poison accumulated from the animal's diet of algae and sponges. It is not destroyed by cooking, there is no way to detect it in the kitchen, and outbreaks in the Indian and Pacific Oceans have repeatedly killed people, children most often.
- Contaminant loadLong-lived marine reptiles concentrate methylmercury, cadmium, and organochlorines in muscle and fat at levels well above advisory limits for regular consumption.
- The shell as a baking dishA carapace scraped clean on a beach is porous keratin and bone that cannot be sanitised, and it sits directly against meat that has already been handled at ambient temperature. Reptile carcasses routinely carry Salmonella.
- No temperature, no timeThe instruction is simply to 'bake in the oven', with no heat setting and no duration given.
- If you want the flavour profileThe seasoning here — salt pork, lime, sherry, tomato, nutmeg and cinnamon — reads as a Caribbean-style treatment of strong meat and works with poultry or pork. Use a current recipe for that; do not adapt this one.
This belongs to a genre of mid-twentieth-century adventure cookery writing that treated the world's fauna as a menu, complete with jokes and a swaggering narrator, published at a time when almost none of the animals involved carried any legal protection. Sea turtle was not exotica then: green turtle was a global commodity from the eighteenth century onward, shipped live from the Caribbean to London and New York for soup, and cooking turtle meat in its own cleaned carapace is recorded in the Antilles and along the Gulf coast. Sustained commercial harvest on that scale is among the reasons the species now appear on protection lists, alongside egg collection, bycatch and habitat loss; the legal protections that eventually reached sea turtles, chiefly CITES and the Endangered Species Act, arrived only in the 1970s. What survives as useful here is the seasoning: salt pork for fat, lime and sherry for acid, and warm spice in small amounts.