It all began out of necessity. In the early 18th century, on discovering that they were edible, British sailors in the Caribbean kept live green turtles on board their ships to ensure a supply of fresh meat. News of this exotic meat, offering cuts whose flavours were reminiscent of veal, beef, ham, and pork, soon spread to their homeland. By the middle of the century some 15,000 live turtles were being imported a year to satisfy the culinary cravings of the English aristocracy, the “most outspoken in their praise of this sea creature’s virtue” as food.
Particularly sought after was turtle soup, a dish that appeared as regularly as clockwork on the menu for the Lord Mayor’s Day Banquet in London from 1761 until 1825. With its dull-green colour, delicate taste, and gelatinous feel in the mouth, it became so popular that turtle-shaped tureens were produced specifically for its presentation at table on formal occasions.
One of the first to publish a recipe for turtle dressed “in the West India way” was Hannah Glasse in her 1751 edition of The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy. As well as a recipe for soup there were others which made use of particular cuts of turtle meat, one for the calipash or back shell, another featuring the calipee or belly, another that made use of the offal and one for the fins. Each dish was allocated a particular spot on the table for service.
Elizabeth Raffald, in The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769), showed how a hundred pound turtle could be used to prepare seven dishes. The first course should be of turtle on its own, she informed her readers, but thereafter the various cuts could be intermingled with other fare or presented in isolation, either approach, she wrote reassuringly, being “sure to be met with approval from the guests”.
For those unsure how to prepare a turtle for cooking, cookery books were unsparing in their gory detail. Beheading or throat-slitting were the preferred methods, according to Amelia Simons’ American Cookery (1796), remembering to retain the blood, after draining, to add some extra flavour to the soup. The fins were then removed, the calipee cut off, and the meat, bones, and entrails removed from the back shell, except for the green fat, known as the monsieur. This was baked on to the shell, from which the soup was served for an enhanced taste.
The consumption of green turtles became so synonymous with the extravagant and luxurious lifestyles of the Georgian rich that it was seized upon by political satirists who contrasted it with the poor fare eaten by the masses. They also pointed out with glee that eating turtle meat was not without its dangers, occasionally leading to chlenotoxism, a type of blood poisoning which can be fatal and for which there is no known antidote. In a case of biter bit, they would portray a diner suffering a sudden and swift death at the dining table.
A print from 1799 combined both these themes, showing an alderman enjoying a bowl of turtle soup while being grabbed by the throat by a skeleton representing Death. “Come, old boy”, the skeleton exclaims, “you have play’d an excellent knife and fork – you cannot grumble – for you have devoured as much in your time as would have fed the Parish poor”.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the mania for turtle meat in Britain and, later, in Germany resulted in overfishing, wiping out stocks of green turtles in their native habitats, pushing up their prices to astronomic levels and leading, ultimately, to their general unavailability. The hunt was on for a suitable alternative.