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Turtle Soup Stock
Prepare and cut up a turtle. Put the pieces of shell in a saucepan over the fire with sufficient boiling water to cover them, and boil for two or three hours, or until the outer edges of the shell are soft. As the water boils away add more, always keeping the shells entirely covered. Cut the soft parts of the shells into pieces about one-half inch square, place them in an earthenware bowl, cover over with a wet napkin, and keep in a cool place until wanted. Place the hard parts of the shells again into water in which it was boiled, put in also one-eighth of the first weight of the turtle of beef bones, and one-sixteenth of the weight of veal bones, or of calf's feet and head as directed for soup, skinning the calf's head. On the top of these ingredients lay the neck and fins of the turtle, and the cushions or rounded muscles at top of the turtle fins, unless part of the latter is to be reserved raw for broiling as steaks; add enough water to cover all, together with two tablespoonfuls of salt, and allow all to boil gently for two hours or more, or until the bones of the fins separate easily from the flesh. Remove any scum which may rise, and keep the soup kettle closely covered. When the fins and cushions are tender, take them out of the stock, separate the flesh from the bones, keeping it in good sized pieces, and put it aside, in a cool place until wanted, in an earthenware vessel covered with a wet cloth. Return the bones to the stock, add to it the proportions usually employed for soup stock, of carrots, turnips, onions, parsley, sweet herbs, whole cloves, mace and peppercorns, and boil gently for five or six hours, keeping the pan closely covered. After the liver, legs, fat and intestines have been soaked in cold water boil them in the stock, the intestines being turned outward like the reversed finger of a glove, and well washed and scraped. When the stock is boiled it should be strained through a folded towel, laid in a colander placed over a large earthenware bowl, until clear. All those parts of the turtle which have been cooked and covered with wet cloths or napkins should now be placed in the bowls and covered with the strained turtle stock; all the stock remaining should be saved for soup. Most turtle cooks advise leaving out the intestines, chiefly because they are more trouble to prepare than they are worth.
This is a professional hotel procedure for breaking down a whole sea turtle, and it cannot be carried out today. The points below explain what specifically blocks it rather than how to adapt it.
- The animal is protectedThe turtle of Waldorf-era turtle soup was the green sea turtle, with hawksbill and loggerhead also used. All sea turtle species are listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and Appendix I of CITES; taking, possessing, importing or selling them is a criminal offence in the United States and in most other jurisdictions.
- No legal substitute is implied hereDiamondback terrapin is protected or tightly regulated across its range, and freshwater snapping turtle, where harvest is permitted, has entirely different anatomy: no soft calipash to be boiled out of the shell, no fins, no cushions. The method above does not transfer. Anyone cooking a legally taken turtle should work from a current, species-specific recipe.
- Salmonella and turtle offalTurtles are a well-documented reservoir for Salmonella, which is why the U.S. banned sales of small pet turtles in 1975. The instruction to soak liver, legs, fat and intestines in cold water before they go into the pot leaves a large quantity of contaminated raw material sitting in standing water at kitchen temperature.
- Cooling and holding are unsafe as describedCooked shell pieces and fin meat are held in earthenware bowls under a wet napkin "in a cool place" for hours, then covered with the strained stock. That is extended time in the bacterial growth range with no measured refrigeration, and the practice would fail any modern food-safety code.
- Sea turtle flesh carries its own toxin riskBeyond bacteria, sea turtle meat and organs have been repeatedly implicated in chelonitoxism, a poisoning of uncertain cause with a high fatality rate, and the liver and fat accumulate heavy metals. This is not a matter of technique.
- The quantities are unusable anywayBones are specified as one-eighth and one-sixteenth of "the first weight of the turtle," a figure the reader never learns, and vegetables and spices are given only as "the proportions usually employed for soup stock." The recipe assumes a hotel kitchen that already knows its own house standard.
- Terms in the textThe "soft parts of the shells" are what older cookbooks call calipash and calipee, the gelatinous green and yellow layers adhering to the carapace and plastron; the "cushions" are the muscle blocks at the base of the flippers. Both are features of marine turtles specifically.
Turtle soup was the definitive luxury course of nineteenth-century Anglo-American dining, and green turtles were shipped live from the Caribbean to New York, London and Liverpool by the thousand, kept in tanks or cellars until wanted. The Waldorf, where Oscar Tschirky presided as maitre d'hotel and to whom the book is attributed, served it as a matter of course, which is why the book devotes an entire preliminary recipe to nothing but reducing the animal to stock and reserved meat, in the way a modern professional manual might treat a mother sauce. The prestige of the dish is exactly what produced the imitations that outlasted it: mock turtle soup, built on a calf's head to mimic the gelatinous shell meat, and later the canned and bottled "turtle soup" of the twentieth century. Sustained commercial harvest of this kind is a large part of why sea turtle populations collapsed, and the trade was closed off in the United States by the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and the CITES listings that followed. The recipe now reads as a record of a cuisine that consumed its own centrepiece out of existence.