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.

No. 768

Turtle Garnishing

Garniture Tortue

The turtle garnishing for meat removes is composed of lamb's sweetbreads or else small calf's sweetbreads, larded and braised; of brains cut into three-quarter inch pieces, bread-crumbed and fried; small peeled truffles cooked in Madeira wine, mushroom heads, quenelles made with a teaspoon (No. 155), egg quenelles composed of hard boiled egg-yolks, pounded with a little butter, some fine herbs and raw yolks, pickled gherkins cut into small balls, stoned and blanched olives, calves' palates, and crawfish a la Bordelaise (No. 1008).

Put into a saucepan some turtle sauce (No. 552), add the peeled truffles, mushrooms, quenelles pickles, olives, egg-quenelles, and palates; mix well together and dress this garnishing, decorating around with the crawfish, brains, and the larded and glazed sweetbreads. Serve a turtle sauce (No. 552) with Madeira separately.

For a Lean Turtle Garnishing.—Make it of fish quenelles (No. 90), hard-boiled egg quenelles, mushroom heads, pickled gherkins cut in balls, stoned and blanched olives, and large crawfish. The lean turtle sauce to accompany it should be reduced with fish essence (No. 388).

← No. 767 Truffle Garnishing Garnishings No. 769 Wings of Turkey or Pullet a la Villeroi Garn →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is not a dish so much as an assembly formula: nine separate preparations, each finished on its own, then bound in turtle sauce at the last moment. Ranhofer gives no quantities because the amount depends on the roast it surrounds.

The hinge: everything is cooked separatelyNothing in the list is cooked in the sauce. Sweetbreads are braised and glazed, brains breaded and fried, truffles cooked in Madeira, quenelles poached, olives blanched, and only then are the soft items warmed through in hot turtle sauce. Simmer the assembly and the quenelles disintegrate and the fried brains go sodden, which is why the brains, crawfish and sweetbreads are set around the outside rather than mixed in.
"Meat removes"A remove was the course that replaced the soup or fish at a formal dinner, generally a large roast or braised joint. This garnish is meant to ring a platter of veal, a braised calf's head or a saddle, not to be served as a dish in its own right.
Calves' palatesThe hard palate of the calf, a gelatinous offcut sold widely in nineteenth-century markets and effectively unobtainable now. It requires long blanching, peeling of the rough outer skin and hours of simmering. Omit it; no ordinary substitute behaves the same way.
BrainsBovine brain is a specified risk material under current EU and UK rules and is restricted or unavailable in many markets; lamb brains are easier to source in some places. Check what your butcher can legally sell before planning on them.
Sweetbreads and lardingLarding here means threading strips of pork fatback through the surface with a larding needle, then glazing the braised sweetbread with reduced braising liquid. Modern sweetbreads, soaked, pressed and pan-glazed, give a broadly similar effect without the needle.
Egg quenellesNot poached forcemeat but a paste of hard-boiled yolks pounded with butter, fine herbs and raw yolk. Ranhofer does not say how they are formed or cooked; presumably rolled small and poached briefly or simply warmed through in the sauce.
Turtle sauceRanhofer's No. 552 is a Madeira-based brown sauce. Turtle sauce of this period was typically infused with the so-called "turtle herbs" — basil, thyme, marjoram, sage, sometimes rosemary — with cayenne and often a little tomato. A well-reduced demi-glace steeped with those herbs and finished with Madeira is a fair working stand-in.
Crawfish à la BordelaiseLive crawfish sauteed with mirepoix, white wine and brandy. Buy them live or use good cooked whole crawfish; they are placed whole around the platter as decoration, not stirred into the sauce.
YieldRanhofer gives no quantities; scale it to the roast it surrounds, allowing two or three pieces of each component per plate, with more sauce served separately.
The lean versionThe second paragraph is the Lenten form — fish quenelles and crawfish in place of the meats, with the sauce reduced with fish essence rather than veal stock. It is a genuinely different dish and much quicker to build.

A Little History

Garniture à la tortue contains no turtle. The name is generally explained by the seasoning: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century turtle soup was flavoured with a bouquet of basil, marjoram, sage and thyme sharpened with cayenne and Madeira, and dishes dressed with that sauce and its attendant trimmings came to be described as done "in the turtle manner." Its classic home is tête de veau en tortue, calf's head served with this array of sweetbreads, brains, quenelles, gherkins, olives and crawfish — mock turtle in the literal sense, the cheap gelatinous head standing in for the expensive turtle. Charles Ranhofer set it down here as a numbered building block of the Delmonico's kitchen, cross-referenced to the sauce, the quenelle forcemeat and the crawfish preparation elsewhere in The Epicurean (1894), which is how a large kitchen could produce it: each element belonged to a different station, and the garnish existed only in the final minute when they were combined.