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Green Turtle, English Style
Prepare a green turtle adding one gill demi-glace and a half gill good sherry. Briskly boil for twenty minutes, then add a half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, one finely chopped hard-boiled egg and a sliced, peeled and seeded lemon; mix well, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
This is a finishing method rather than a complete recipe, and its central ingredient cannot legally or ethically be obtained today. The notes below explain the terms and why the dish is closed to modern cooks.
- The green turtleChelonia mydas, the green sea turtle, is listed as endangered or threatened throughout its range and is protected under CITES Appendix I and, in the United States, the Endangered Species Act. Buying, importing, possessing or serving it is a criminal offence in most of the world; there is no legal commercial supply. If you want a turtle soup, use a current recipe for a mock version.
- It is not a whole recipe"Prepare a green turtle" assumes the cook has already done the long butchering, blanching and stock-making, presumably set out elsewhere in the book. What is given here is only the finishing, which is why the instructions read as though they begin in the middle.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces. Half a gill is therefore 2 fluid ounces, about 4 tablespoons, in practice a generous splash.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock thickened to a syrupy glaze — in a hotel kitchen of the period a standing preparation from the sauce station. Modern jarred or frozen demi-glace is often saltier and more gelatinous than a house-made reduction, and may need thinning to behave the same way.
- "Briskly boil for twenty minutes"Sound for the clear, well-reduced turtle broth this assumes, but a hard twenty-minute boil is destructive to almost any modern stock enriched with wine — it drives off the sherry aroma the recipe is trying to add. The instruction belongs to a kitchen finishing an already-cooked, gelatine-heavy liquid.
- The garnishChopped parsley, minced hard-boiled egg and peeled lemon are a traditional English service for turtle soup; here they go in after the boiling rather than during it. A similar garnish pattern appears in mock turtle and in some clear consommés.
- YieldThe original gives no volume for the turtle preparation itself, so no serving count can be derived from the gill of demi-glace and half gill of sherry.
Green turtle soup was the definitive luxury soup of nineteenth-century Anglo-American dining, a fixture at civic banquets, aldermen's dinners and transatlantic liner menus; live turtles were shipped from the Caribbean to London and New York and kept in tanks until wanted. The English style meant a clear or lightly glazed broth finished with sherry, lemon and hard-boiled egg, as against the thicker, more heavily spiced French treatments — and the demand it created was severe enough that mock turtle soup, built on a calf's head to imitate the gelatinous texture, became a standard household substitute long before conservation entered the picture. Its presence in an international collection reflects a cookbook tradition still cataloguing the grand hotel repertoire; the collapse of Atlantic and Caribbean turtle populations over the following decades, and the legal protections that followed, drove the dish from all but a few tables.