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Stewed Turtle
Clean a small turtle, place it in a saucepan of cold water, and sufficiently boil it to enable the meat to be easily removed. Cut out the meat in small pieces, put them into a saucepan with a seasoning of salt, cayenne pepper, spices and a little lemon; add a few hard boiled eggs cut up and sufficient white wine to moisten. Boil until the meat is quite tender, turn the whole out on to a dish and serve. The meat for this should be rather over than underdone. The wine and lemon may be substituted by rich stock or by turtle soup.
Side Dishes. Anchovy Tartines Unroll, dry and cut into narrow strips the contents of a bottle of anchovies preserved in oil. Cut some French rolls into round slices, butter them well and arrange a few of the strips of anchovy on them so as to form an open or trellis work. In the center, or opening, put the yolk and white of an egg and parsley or finely chopped gherkins, varying them so as not to let the colors contrast; put them on a dish with a napkin spread over it and serve with cheese.
The turtle half of this page cannot be reproduced today. What follows explains why, and covers the anchovy tartines that share the entry.
- The turtle itselfIn an American hotel kitchen of Oscar's day, "a small turtle" could mean green sea turtle, diamondback terrapin, or a freshwater snapper; the book does not say which. Green sea turtles are protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and listed on CITES Appendix I; taking, buying or possessing them is a criminal matter. Diamondback terrapin harvest is now banned or tightly restricted across much of its range.
- Species you cannot identifyThe recipe never says which turtle, and a cook working from it has no way to know what is in the pot. That alone puts it out of reach: legality, and edibility, depend entirely on the species.
- ChelonitoxismSeveral marine turtle species accumulate a heat-stable toxin from their diet of algae and sponges. Cooking does not destroy it, and poisonings from eating sea turtle meat are documented and sometimes fatal.
- SalmonellaReptiles are a reservoir for Salmonella, and turtle carcasses shed it heavily during butchery. The recipe's handling — boil, break down, cut up on a board, return to the pan — offers plenty of opportunity for cross-contamination with no instruction about it.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe from a source that addresses species and sourcing, or make mock turtle, which was far commoner than the real thing in nineteenth-century home cooking.
- Anchovy tartines: the anchoviesAnchovies bottled in oil in this period were generally saltier and coarser than a modern tin, and the recipe's instruction to "unroll" them suggests rolled fillets. Rinse, pat dry and cut into strips no wider than a pencil lead so the lattice reads as a pattern rather than a mat of fish.
- "French rolls"Small, soft-crumbed white rolls, not baguette. A slim brioche roll or a soft dinner roll sliced about a quarter-inch thick and lightly toasted holds the butter without going soggy.
- Reading the colour instruction"Varying them so as not to let the colors contrast" is ambiguous as printed. One reading is that the yolk, white, parsley and gherkin fillings should vary from round to round rather than clash on a single one; on that reading, make two or three fillings and alternate them.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough guide, one bottle of anchovies and two rolls will yield about a dozen rounds, enough for a savoury for six as part of a larger service, served cold with cheese.
Turtle was the great luxury protein of nineteenth-century hotel dining, and Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf sat near the end of that run. Green sea turtles were shipped live to New York and Philadelphia and kept in tanks; diamondback terrapin, cooked in cream and sherry, was the dish by which a fashionable kitchen was judged in the 1890s, with Maryland and Chesapeake terrapin commanding prices that put it beside canvasback duck and Lynnhaven oysters. Demand of exactly this kind is generally credited with collapsing both populations in the early twentieth century, and Prohibition is often said to have finished off the market by removing the sherry the classic preparation depended on, though the decline was already well advanced. The recipe's closing line, allowing the wine and lemon to be replaced by "rich stock or by turtle soup," suggests that turtle soup may have been kept on hand in a hotel of this size, made in quantity and drawn on as a base. Mock turtle, built from a calf's head to imitate the gelatinous texture, was the version home cooks were more likely to encounter.