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Soups a La Tortue
Get one pound of turtle, with eggs if you can, cut in pieces an inch long. Take a tablespoonful of lard, one table-spoonful of flour, put in a soup pot, brown well, add an onion chopped fine and the turtle, which has been well seasoned; to this add two quarts of boiling water, a teaspoonful of cloves and allspice; let it boil for two hours very hard, then place it on the back of the range and boil slowly for another hour. If you have any turtle eggs place them in the pot; if you have not, boil two chicken eggs, chop fine, slice a lemon, put the chopped eggs and lemon in the soup tureen and pour in your soup. Many persons like it with claret, a half of a glassful is sufficient, and improves it. The turtle eggs should only be put in the soup a half hour before serving.
This is a nineteenth-century turtle soup, and the obstacle is not technique but the main ingredient. Turtle meat and, above all, turtle eggs cannot lawfully or safely be sourced the way this recipe assumes.
- Sea turtle is banned outrightMuch of the hotel and steamer-trade turtle soup of this period used the green sea turtle, though American cookbooks also worked with snapping turtle and terrapin, and this recipe does not specify. All sea turtle species are protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and listed by CITES; possession, purchase and import are prohibited. There is no legal route to that ingredient.
- Turtle eggs are not obtainableThe recipe treats turtle eggs as a garnish you might happen to have. Taking sea turtle eggs is prohibited throughout the United States, and taking eggs from native freshwater turtle nests is restricted or prohibited in many states.
- Diamondback terrapin and other native turtlesThe other classic soup turtle, the diamondback terrapin, is now regulated or fully protected in most states along its range, and harvest of native freshwater turtles is restricted or closed in many others. "Get one pound of turtle" was a plain market instruction when this was written; it is not one now.
- Salmonella and reptile meatReptiles are a well-documented reservoir of Salmonella, and turtle eggs in particular carry it on and within the shell. The half-hour egg addition at the end of this recipe gives no assurance of reaching a safe internal temperature.
- Contaminant load in wild turtlesLong-lived aquatic turtles bioaccumulate mercury, PCBs and organochlorine pesticides in fat and liver. Several state health departments advise against eating snapping turtle taken from inland waters for exactly this reason.
- What to cook insteadIf you want the flavour profile the recipe is chasing, look to a current published recipe for mock turtle soup or a veal-based clear soup with the same clove, allspice, lemon and claret finish. We are not going to supply adapted timings for a dish whose central ingredient is protected.
Turtle soup was the great luxury soup of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, carried alive in ships' holds from the Caribbean to the kitchens of London, Philadelphia and New Orleans, where live turtles were kept in tanks until wanted. Its prestige is why mock turtle soup exists at all: a calf's head dressed with the same clove, allspice, lemon and wine seasonings, sold to households that could not reach the real thing. Commercial turtle fishing collapsed through the twentieth century, and the legal protections that followed are the reason a recipe this casual now reads as a historical document rather than a set of instructions.