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Green Turtle, Parsons
Procure and open a pint can green turtle, thoroughly heat it in a bain-marie, then cut the meat into half-inch-square pieces and keep it in the broth of the turtle.
Have one and a half quarts hot, strained beef consomme in a saucepan; add the turtle, half gill sherry and a tablespoon brandy; season with a saltspoon cayenne pepper and slowly boil the soup for twenty minutes. Skim the fat from the surface, add three tablespoons arrowroot diluted in two tablespoons sherry; lightly mix, boil for one minute longer, pour into a hot soup tureen and serve.
N.B. Excellent green turtle, already prepared, can now be obtained at almost any reliable fish dealer's; still I deem it proper to give the subjoined explanations of how to prepare it.
This soup depends on one ingredient that can no longer legally be bought, sold, or eaten in the United States and most of the world. The rest of the method is unremarkable; the turtle is the whole problem.
- The green turtle is protectedChelonia mydas, the green sea turtle, has been listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act since 1978 and is covered by CITES Appendix I, which bars international commercial trade. Possessing or serving the meat is a criminal matter, not a question of taste or sourcing.
- The canned product no longer existsThe author's confident note that "excellent green turtle, already prepared, can now be obtained at almost any reliable fish dealer's" describes a supply chain that was dismantled by law. Tinned green turtle meat and turtle soup have not been legitimately available for decades.
- Freshwater and farmed turtle is not a fixSnapping turtle and farmed softshell are sold in some markets, but they are different animals with different flesh, and several native freshwater species are themselves protected or season-restricted depending on the state. Anyone wanting a turtle soup should work from a current recipe written for a legal species.
- Mock turtle is the historical answerNineteenth-century kitchens already had a substitute tradition built on calf's head, and later on beef and veal, precisely because real turtle was scarce and costly. That is the line to follow if the goal is the flavor of the period rather than the animal.
- Reading the original measuresFor anyone working through the text: a gill is half a cup, so half a gill of sherry is about a quarter cup, or four tablespoons, and a saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon. Arrowroot, used here as the thickener, sets clear rather than cloudy, which is why it was preferred to flour in clear soups.
- YieldA pint of meat in a quart and a half of consommé — servings-worth: roughly six to eight small tureen portions, a first-course quantity rather than a meal.
Green turtle soup was the defining luxury soup of nineteenth-century Anglo-American dining, served at civic banquets, aldermen's dinners and the grand hotels; live turtles were shipped north from the Caribbean and Florida and kept in tanks until wanted, and the gelatinous "calipash" and "calipee" from beneath the shells were prized above the muscle meat. By the time this book appeared, canning had put a version of it within reach of any household with a good fish dealer, which is exactly what the author's aside is boasting about. That accessibility is the beginning of the story's end: sustained commercial harvest for the soup and turtle-shell trades helped push nesting populations to the point where the animal is now protected across its range, and the green turtle dish survives chiefly as mock turtle soup, made from calf's head or beef — turtle soup itself is still made from legal species, such as the snapper soup of Philadelphia — and in the turtle-shaped soup tureens that turn up in antique shops.