Important: Safety Warning

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.

No. 1092

Green Turtle Baked-Small

Petite Tortue Verte au Gratin

Obtain a young turtle weighing ten pounds; remove and lard the meat with small lardons; clean well the carapace; braise the meats in a mirepoix stock (No. 419) with the belly shells, letting the meats be well cooked, and the braise stock reduced to half; transfer the meats to a vessel, strain the stock over and let it get cold. Cut the meats up into quarter inch squares, as well as the cutaneous parts from the belly. Fry in butter four ounces of onions cut in squares; sift over some flour, and moisten with the stock; add the turtle meat; stir the preparation until it comes to a boil, season and thicken with hard boiled egg-yolks mixed with an equal quantity of butter, and press through a fine sieve. Add some parsley and finely chopped raw mushrooms; then use this stew to fill up the carapace or deep shell; bestrew over with bread-raspings, besprinkle with butter and brown a nice color in a slow oven; serve when very hot.

← No. 1091 Turtle, Havana Style Green Turtle No. 1093 Turtle Stewed a la Foster →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a dish that can be read but not cooked. The single ingredient it is built around is a protected species, and nothing in the method can be adjusted to get around that.

The turtle is the problemThe green turtle, Chelonia mydas, is listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and on Appendix I of CITES, which bars international commercial trade. Taking, killing, buying or selling one is a criminal offence in the United States and in most of the world; a ten-pound animal is a juvenile that has not yet bred.
No legal supply existsNo legal supply exists for a cook in the US or Europe -- The Key West and Caribbean turtle kraals that fed New York kitchens in Ranhofer's day were closed long ago. The one surviving operation, the Cayman Turtle Centre, sells green turtle meat lawfully within the Cayman Islands alone; it cannot be imported. Anywhere else, what is sold as "green turtle" is either a different, farmed freshwater species or contraband, and neither belongs in this recipe.
The shell is not a serving dishThe whole conceit here is baking the stew back inside the cleaned carapace and browning it as a gratin. Sea turtle shell is also a controlled wildlife product, so even a shell obtained separately cannot lawfully be used.
Health, not just lawSea turtle flesh is a documented vehicle for chelonitoxism, a poorly understood and sometimes fatal poisoning, and large marine reptiles concentrate mercury and organochlorine residues in fat and liver. Cooking does not address either.
If you want the dishUse a current recipe for a braised-and-gratinated meat stew from a lawful animal. We are not supplying a substitution scheme for this one.
Reading the method"Bread-raspings" are dried crumbs scraped from a crust; "cutaneous parts" means the gelatinous skin from the belly plates; the mirepoix stock of No. 419 is Ranhofer's braising liquor, characteristically root vegetables, raw ham and wine. Flour is sifted over the onions here, but the finishing egg-yolk-and-butter paste pressed through a sieve is a classic French liaison, closer to a mounted butter than to a roux.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's for most of the second half of the nineteenth century, and The Epicurean (1894) records a period when green turtle was the definitive luxury of American public dining. Live turtles arrived by schooner from Florida and the Caribbean, were held in salt-water kraals or in hotel cellars, and were butchered for clear turtle soup, the calipash and calipee that thickened it, and set-piece dishes like this one, where the stew is returned to the shell and browned. Green turtle soup was so entrenched a status dish that "mock turtle," made from a calf's head, existed purely to imitate it for households that could not buy the real thing. The trade collapsed under its own weight: nesting populations were stripped through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and by the 1970s the green turtle had passed into the first tier of international protection. The recipe survives as evidence of how completely a restaurant fashion could consume a wild animal.