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.
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Green Turtle Steak
They are sometimes sold in market, or can be found at the grocers canned. Some claim them to be an over-rated dainty, while others pronounce them exquisite. The latter class prefer them in a chafing dish, as follows:
Melt two ounces of butter in the chafing dish, add a tablespoonful of mushrooms, catsup, a cube of cut sugar, two tablespoonfuls of currant jelly, a gill of port wine, a dash of cayenne and a little salt. In this simmer the steak until tender.
This one is a historical document rather than a working recipe. The central ingredient cannot legally or ethically be obtained, and the rest of the instructions are inseparable from it.
- The green turtle is protectedChelonia mydas is listed as threatened or endangered throughout its range and is covered by CITES Appendix I and, in the United States, the Endangered Species Act. Possessing, importing, buying or selling the meat is a criminal offence, and the nineteenth-century turtle trade this recipe assumes is a direct cause of the collapse.
- "Canned at the grocers" no longer existsTinned green turtle and turtle soup were common grocery items in this period. That supply chain was closed by wildlife law in the later twentieth century; turtle soup sold today is generally mock turtle (traditionally calf's head, in modern canned versions usually beef) or is made from farmed freshwater snapping turtle, a different animal with different handling requirements.
- The chelonitoxism riskBeyond the legal question, sea turtle flesh is a documented cause of chelonitoxism, a poisoning with no known antidote that has killed people who ate turtle meat; the toxin is generally thought to come from algae in the turtles' diet, though the agent has not been firmly identified. Turtles also concentrate mercury, cadmium and organochlorines in their tissue. Neither hazard is removed by cooking.
- Use a current recipe insteadIf the chafing-dish treatment interests you, work from a modern recipe for a lean red meat in a port and currant sauce. Do not adapt the timings here to a substitute; "simmer until tender" was written for a specific meat and tells you nothing useful about another.
- Glossary, for reading the pageA gill is half a cup. "A cube of cut sugar" is a lump from a sugar loaf broken up for the table, roughly a teaspoon. "Mushrooms, catsup" is almost certainly mushroom catsup, the thin fermented mushroom sauce that preceded tomato ketchup in English cookery, not two separate ingredients.
- About the warning at the topThe bird-and-egg notice is a modern insertion and not part of the original text. It does not describe this recipe, though the underlying point about protected species applies here with more force.
Green turtle was the great luxury protein of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Anglo-American table: live turtles were shipped north from the Caribbean and kept in cellars and hotel tanks, and turtle soup was a standard opening course at civic banquets in London, Philadelphia and New York. Demand was so heavy that mock turtle soup, built on a calf's head to mimic the gelatinous texture, became a standard household recipe in its own right, and Lewis Carroll's Mock Turtle depends on every reader knowing the joke. By the time this book was written, canned turtle had brought a former banquet dish within reach of the middle-class kitchen, which is exactly why the author can shrug that some think it "an over-rated dainty." The chafing dish, with its port, currant jelly and cayenne, belonged to the same moment: a fashionable piece of tableside equipment for late suppers and hotel-style entertaining. What the entry does not record is the cost of that abundance, which the sea turtle populations of the Atlantic and Caribbean have still not recovered from.