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 information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Turtle Garnish
This is made of mushrooms, truffles, brains, beef palates, olives, gherkins and chicken quenelles, as follows: Prepare and cook some mushrooms, large whole truffles and brains, also small rounds of beef palate, chicken quenelles moulded with teaspoons, stoned olives and small balls of gherkins, cut out with a cutter. Put the mushrooms, truffles, palate, quenelles and olives into a sautepan with a little of the liquor from the turtle it is to be served with; let it thicken over the fire, and it is ready for use. The brains and gherkins are arranged on the top of the other ingredients.
This is a classical French garniture à la tortue as it stood in an 1890s American hotel kitchen: a composed set of small cooked items finished in a little of the turtle's own cooking liquor and spooned over the soup or ragout. Two of its components are no longer legally or safely available in the form the recipe assumes.
- The turtle liquorThe turtle behind a garnish like this was almost certainly the green sea turtle, Chelonia mydas, the standard turtle of nineteenth-century turtle soup, then imported live from the Caribbean and Florida; the recipe itself names no species. Chelonia mydas is now protected under the Endangered Species Act and listed by CITES, and it cannot lawfully be bought for the pot.
- BrainsBrain and spinal tissue from older cattle is classed as specified risk material for BSE and kept out of the food supply in the United States, the United Kingdom and the EU: in the US from cattle 30 months and older, in the EU and UK from bovines over 12 months. Calf brain is therefore still legal in some jurisdictions, and lamb and pork brains are not covered by the same restrictions. The recipe gives no species, no age and no cooking temperature, and ordinary cooking does not destroy prions in any case.
- Beef palateThe hard palate of the ox was a standard hotel garnish meat, blanched, scraped of its rough skin and simmered for hours until gelatinous, then punched into rounds. It has effectively vanished from retail butchery in English-speaking countries and is not a straightforward special order.
- Quenelles moulded with teaspoonsA quenelle here is a forcemeat of pounded raw chicken bound with panada and egg, shaped between two wetted teaspoons and poached, not boiled, in barely trembling stock. Boiling water tears them open; the surface should never break.
- Sautepan and "let it thicken"No flour or roux is added. The thickening is the reduction of the turtle liquor itself, which is heavily gelatinous from the shell and cartilage, so it glazes the garnish as it tightens. A modern thin stock will not behave this way.
- Why the brains and gherkins go on lastThe recipe does not say. The likely reasons are practical: poached brains break apart if turned in a pan, and pickled gherkin balls would bleed vinegar into the reduction and thin it. Both are simply placed on the surface instead.
- ScaleThe recipe gives no quantities, as was usual for a hotel garnish made up to whatever quantity of soup was being served. How many pieces of each component went into a portion is not stated.
- If you want the dishA current recipe should be used, worked from a lawful stock and without brain tissue.
Turtle soup was the great luxury course of nineteenth-century Anglo-American dining, and the garniture à la tortue was the flourish that proved a kitchen could afford it: truffles, quenelles, olives and offal cut into uniform shapes and floated on a soup that already cost a fortune. Live green turtles were shipped north from the Caribbean and kept in hotel cellars, and real turtle was scarce and costly enough that mock turtle soup, built on a calf's head to imitate the gelatinous texture, became a standard of its own. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maitre d'hotel whose name carried The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896), was recording the working repertoire of a hotel that served this garnish as a matter of routine; the entry reads as a reference note for cooks who already knew what a beef palate was and needed only the assembly order. The dish is a fair measure of how far the ingredients of high-end cooking have shifted in a century: the turtle is now protected and the brains are barred, while other components of the garnish are easier to come by than they were in 1896.