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. 353

Green Turtle Soup, Clear a la Royal or Thick with Marrow Quenelles

Soupe Tortue Verte, Claire a la Royale ou liee aux Quenelles a la Moelle

Clear.-Put eight quarts of beef stock into a soup-pot with four pounds of leg of veal, and four pounds of fowl or chicken wings, thyme, bay leaf, parsley, basil, marjoram, mushroom trimmings, and celery; boil all for three hours, then strain through a sieve, and afterward through a napkin. Clarify this stock the same as consomme with chopped beef. Cook separately the prepared turtle, and keep it warm in a steamer (bain-marie); add to the soup a dessertspoonful of arrowroot for each quart, diluted with a little water, and add it to the boiling broth, stirring it in with a whip; boil and despumate the soup for twenty minutes, then season. When ready to serve, drain the turtle, lay it in a soup tureen, and pour over the stock, seasoning with cayenne pepper and half a gill of Xeres for each quart.

For Clear Turtle a la Royal.—Add some royale timbales (No. 241).

Thick Turtle with Marrow Quenelles.—Proceed exactly the same as for clear turtle, but instead of thickening it with arrowroot, thicken the soup with a little brown roux, moistened with the turtle stock, boil and despumate, and strain through a fine sieve Garnish with marrow quenelles (No. 252), or if preferred, use turtle fat instead of marrow. Quenelles may also be made with a quarter of a pound of hard boiled egg-yolks pounded with one ounce of butter and four raw egg-yolks, seasoning with salt, nutmeg, and chopped parsley; divide this into pieces, roll them into balls half an inch in diameter, and poach them in boiling water; drain, and serve with the soup.

← No. 352 Preparation of a Green Turtle Weighing One H Soups & Broths No. 354 Mock Turtle or Calf's Head, Clear Soup →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a set of instructions for cooking an animal that can no longer legally be bought, sold or eaten in most of the world. The notes below explain why, and translate the terms so the page can be read as the historical document it is.

The turtle is the problemThe green turtle, Chelonia mydas, is assessed as endangered by the IUCN and is protected internationally under CITES Appendix I; in the United States it is listed under the Endangered Species Act, as threatened or endangered depending on the population. Buying, importing, possessing or serving it is an offence, and there is no legal supply chain for it.
No substitution is impliedThe recipe as written depends on the turtle prepared in No. 352 and on turtle stock and turtle fat. Nothing about it can be reconstructed from ingredients you can lawfully obtain. If you want a soup of this character, use a current recipe.
Health risk as well as legal riskMarine turtle meat carries a documented burden of accumulated heavy metals, particularly mercury and cadmium, and outbreaks of severe and sometimes fatal poisoning (chelonitoxism) have followed consumption of sea turtle flesh in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Cooking does not remove either hazard.
The period's own alternativeRanhofer places mock turtle, made from a calf's head, immediately after this entry at No. 354. That was the standard nineteenth-century stand-in when turtle was unavailable or too costly, and it is the recipe of the two that can still be cooked.
Reading the termsXeres is sherry; a gill is half a cup, so half a gill per quart is about two fluid ounces, roughly four tablespoons. To despumate is to skim the scum and fat rising to the surface during a long slow boil, repeatedly, until the surface stays clear.
Bain-marieIn 1894 the word means a water bath or steam table used to hold cooked food hot without further cooking, not the baked custard technique the phrase now usually suggests.
ScaleEight quarts of beef stock reinforced with eight pounds of veal and poultry is a restaurant batch. Delmonico's kitchen worked at this scale as a matter of course.

A Little History

Green turtle soup was the definitive luxury soup of the English-speaking nineteenth century, and its presence here in three variations reflects how central it was to a New York restaurant of Delmonico's standing when Charles Ranhofer compiled The Epicurean in 1894. Live turtles were shipped north from the Caribbean and Florida and kept in tanks or cellars until wanted, which is why the preceding entry, No. 352, deals with butchering a hundred-pound animal; the soup proper begins only after that work is done. Demand of exactly this kind, sustained across London, New York and the ports that supplied them, is generally credited with driving the collapse of Atlantic green turtle populations, and the trade is now closed. The mock turtle that follows at No. 354, and the turtle-shaped tureens that survive in museum collections, are the residue of a dish whose ingredient the fashion for it helped destroy.