No. 351

Dried Turtle, Thick and Clear

Tortue Seche Liee et Claire

Dry.—This green turtle comes from South America; it is raw and dried in pieces; the only parts being used for drying are the cutaneous ones. When the dried turtle is needed put it first to soak in cold water for two or three days, changing the water frequently. Half a pound of dry turtle suffices to make soup for eight persons; when the pieces have softened, put them into a small stock-pot with six quarts of water, adding to it a piece of shin of beef, weighing two pounds; a two pound piece of neck of veal, a three pound chicken, two or three chicken giblets, a bone of cooked ham, carrots, celery, a bunch of marjoram, savory, parsley, thyme, and bay leaf. Cook the meats the same as for a pot-a-feu (No. 342), either on the gas, or on the back of the range, and as soon as the pieces of turtle are done, remove them and plunge them into cold water; then cut them into one inch and a quarter squares, and lay them in a saucepan with a little consomme; skim off the fat from the soup, strain, and set about two quarts of it into a saucepan; thicken it with blond roux (No. 163), despumate the soup while allowing it to boil slowly, remove all the fat, and season with salt and cayenne pepper, also two gills of good Madeira wine. Put the pieces of turtle into a soup tureen, and pour the soup over. Should the turtle be needed clear, then suppress the roux, clarify the broth, and thicken it with arrowroot or potato fecula. Serve slices of lemon at the same time.

← No. 350 Terrapin, Clear, Thick or White Soups & Broths No. 352 Preparation of a Green Turtle Weighing One H →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a soup built on an ingredient that no longer exists in legal commerce. The notes below are for reading the recipe, not for cooking it.

The turtle is the problemChelonia mydas, the green sea turtle, is listed on CITES Appendix I and protected under the US Endangered Species Act and equivalent laws in most of the world. Buying, importing or possessing dried green turtle is a criminal offence, not a matter of taste or availability.
No substitution is intended hereSnapping turtle and farmed softshell are sold in some markets, but the whole method above is written around rehydrating dried cutaneous plate from a wild sea turtle. Anyone wanting turtle-style soup should work from a current recipe rather than adapting this one.
What the dried product was"Cutaneous" parts means the leathery skin and the gelatinous tissue from the shell margins, dried raw. The recipe's two- to three-day soak in frequently changed water was needed to soften the dried pieces before cooking.
Reading the quantitiesA gill is half a cup, so two gills of Madeira is one cup. The meats are started in six quarts of water; the broth is then skimmed and strained and about two quarts of it taken for the soup itself. The recipe states that half a pound of dry turtle makes soup for eight persons.
The vocabularyBlond roux is flour cooked in butter only to a pale straw colour. To despumate is to hold the pot at a bare simmer and lift the scum and fat as it rises. Potato fecula is potato starch, and pot-a-feu is the French boiled-beef pot of No. 342, whose long, gentle simmering of the meats is the method being borrowed.
Thick versus clearThe two versions of the title diverge only at the end: thick is bound with roux; clear suppresses the roux, has the broth clarified (customarily with egg white) and lightly bound with arrowroot or potato starch, which sets without clouding. The recipe finishes by directing that slices of lemon be served at the same time.

A Little History

Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of what Delmonico's in New York actually served, and turtle soup was one of the fixed points of that kind of dining. Live green turtles were shipped north from the Caribbean and South America through the nineteenth century, and dried turtle of the sort described here was the shelf-stable trade good that let a kitchen serve the dish out of season; the recipe that follows this one in the book deals with butchering a whole live animal, which tells you how routine the traffic was. The taste ran deep enough that mock turtle soup, built on a calf's head to imitate the gelatinous texture, became a standard of English and American cookery in its own right. Sustained commercial hunting of exactly this kind is a large part of why the green turtle needed protecting, and the international trade was largely closed off from the mid-1970s, when CITES came into force.