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Turtle Fins Financiere
Scald and wash the fins of a turtle, remove the large bones, and insert thin tubes in the cavities; bind the fins tightly in cloths, place them in a saucepan with enough water or broth to cover, and boil until tender. When done, take them out and let them cool, but without removing the cloths. Have ready a little turtle quenelle mixture poached in turtle consomme, remove the cloths and tubes from the fins, stuff them with the mixture, warm up again and serve. A garnish composed of fancy shapes cut out from the firm red part of a cooked beef tongue, truffles, breast of chicken, champignons, and also small quenelles, may also be used.
This is a set piece of the grand hotel kitchen, and it cannot be reproduced today. The problem is not technique but the animal itself.
- The turtle is the obstacle"Turtle" on a Waldorf menu of this period meant the green sea turtle, Chelonia mydas, shipped live from the Caribbean and Florida and kept in tanks until wanted. The species is now listed as endangered and protected internationally; taking, importing, buying or selling it is illegal in the United States and most other countries.
- The fins are not an incidental partThe whole dish is built on the flippers, which have no substitute in another animal. Diamondback terrapin, once the other luxury turtle of American hotel cooking, is likewise now protected or restricted in most of its range. There is no legal source for the central ingredient.
- Snapping turtle is not a workaroundCommon snapping turtle is legal to take in some states under licence, but its limbs are nothing like a sea turtle flipper, and it carries a well-documented Salmonella risk along with accumulated mercury and PCBs from freshwater sediment. Wild-caught reptile meat is not a casual substitution.
- What the tubes were forThe thin tubes inserted after boning appear to hold the flipper open so that it cooks and sets around a cavity; the cloth binding holds the shape through both the boiling and the cooling. The technique is worth understanding as kitchen history even though the dish is closed to us.
- Financiere, for the recordA financiere garnish is the classic mixture named here: quenelles, cockscombs or chicken breast, truffles, mushrooms (champignons), and often olives, bound in a Madeira sauce. The same garnish is still made and belongs to sweetbreads, vol-au-vents and poached chicken.
- If you want the effectUse a current recipe for a financiere garnish over veal sweetbreads or poached capon-sized chicken. Nothing else in this preparation needs recovering.
Green turtle was one of the defining luxuries of nineteenth-century American and British public dining: turtle soup opened civic banquets, and hotels advertised the arrival of live turtles the way they later advertised terrapin. Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf, opened in 1893, worked squarely in that tradition, and the escoffier-era garnish named financiere - said to have been named for its costliness, in the manner of dishes called a la financiere from the early nineteenth century onward - was the standard dress for any expensive braised or poached centerpiece. The fins were among the prized parts of the animal, along with the green fat, and were prepared much as here, boned and reshaped so that the finished piece looked deliberate rather than anatomical. Populations declined under demand of this kind, among other pressures; the dish reads now as a small record of how a food fashion can eat a species down to protected status.