Photo courtesy of the Court of Two Sisters.
Turtle soup au sherry, served at the Court of Two Sisters in New Orleans.
Anything made of meat has been fashioned into cuisine somewhere, and the stolid, armored turtles and tortoises of the world have joined their fellow beasts in stewpots. With rabbits and llamas, turtles occupy an uncomfortable space on the spectrum of animals that ranges from dogs (bosom companions who await us in Heaven) to scallops (born hors d’oeuvres). With its plodding, determined gait, curmudgeonly face, and ability to seal itself away, exciting the envy of introverts everywhere, the turtle can seem a bit too sympathetic for the table. Alas, they’re delicious, and they’re especially savored in a once-adored dish now a niche specialty of the Creole kitchen: turtle soup.
Previously enjoyed by Indigenous populations, turtle meat arrived on the European palate out of necessity: you could catch green sea turtles in the Caribbean and carry them on board a ship to feed the crew. Easier to transport and keep alive than most food animals (they even come in their own box), cold-blooded turtles and their slow metabolisms could store protein and calories until sailors needed them without requiring much feeding or care. From these mariners, turtle meat spread to feed those of both lower and higher status. Because it was locally abundant and cheap, it could be fed to those enslaved in the Caribbean; because it was exotic and spoke to the success of imperial trade, it began to grace the tables of the British well-to-do. (Scarcity due to the difficulty of getting a living turtle all the way to London also played a role.) From its origins in London society and on Caribbean plantations, turtle soup spread to Britain’s other colonies and to the continent, becoming a status marker in the emerging United States.
Turtle soup was so coveted that in some cities, restaurants would announce when a turtle arrived so diners could plan around the butchering and boiling. As the dish’s popularity grew, cooks expanded their options, both turning their attention to other turtle species and rebranding calf’s-head soup as “mock turtle.” (This taxonomically chaotic substitution is the origin of the “Mock Turtle,” complete with shell, hooves, and bovine head, as it appears in the original illustrations to Alice in Wonderland.) American industry worked to democratize the dish; from 1869, the Texas coast began selling canned turtle meat. Cookbooks, up to and including that great eminence The Joy of Cooking, offered recipes for the housewife eager to try her hand at the fabled stew. Canned mock and actual turtle soup became available, offering that most American contradiction: a quick, convenient luxury. All of these pressures, except the calves’ heads, meant more and more turtles were pulled from waterways.
You know what happened next: populations of key turtle species crashed, leading to bans on the exploitation of species like the green sea turtle and the Chesapeake diamondback. U.S. turtle farming began in the early 1900s and has now replaced the harvesting of wild turtles, lessening pressure on those populations but running into red tape: because turtles are such good hosts for salmonella, of toilet-hugging fame, interstate trade of small turtles is tightly regulated, and much of the U.S. turtle production is instead earmarked for export, largely to Asian countries with their own turtle-based cuisines. For most people, it’s just as well: the American appetite for turtle soup has faded, with the once-aspirational dish joining aspic salads and lobster thermidor in the cobwebby recesses of the American menu. Mostly.
South Louisiana, a region where tradition is famously more reliable than the earth beneath your feet, boasts several old-line restaurants that still serve turtle soup (and some farms that stock their kitchens). At Commander’s Palace and Galatoire’s in New Orleans, along with Parrain’s in Baton Rouge and a fair number of others, diners can still order and savor this grande old dame of the upmarket table.
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Nevertheless, one can’t help but acknowledge the creativity and can-do attitude of those first cooks who turned mariners’ necessities into duchess-tempting suppers. It’s hard to imagine being the first person to look at a turtle—cool to the touch, armored against the knife—and imagine a rich, warming soup, alive with flavor and booze. A mid-eighteenth-century recipe goes into necessary but grim detail about dressing the poor creature; one must scald the head and rinse all the blood from the lungs, as every bit of the luxury meat contributes to the stock, before describing a familiar flavor profile. Eggs, herbs, vegetables (including the Cajun trinity) join the turtle meat and stock in a pot populated with veal broth and a solid chug-a-lug of fortified Madeira wine, which we can imagine the cook having already turned to in order to steel herself for the butchery.
Modern recipes assume you won’t have to slay and section your own turtle, or at least leave that part unstated, but both Brennan’s and Emeril’s have boldly placed their recipes online, allowing us to see that they’re the clear descendants of the old one above, give or take Worcestershire sauce and specific lung instruction. With no disrespect to these fabled institutions, it’s a soup recipe, with nothing outside the norm of your average capable home cook’s experience except, you know—the turtle.
Which is what it all comes down to in the end: the turtle, and the sherry. Turtle is the anti-chicken, tasting not like generic “meat” but like itself and only like itself (ruefully for the turtles who’d prefer their meat inside their shells). A little aquatic but more solid than fish, more substantial than other seafood, it tastes like a wetland the way oysters taste like the ocean and good venison like the woods. One of the joys of trying new foods is having the new data point for future exploration and comparison, and while other things you try may—may—taste like turtle soup, turtle soup remains the reference, the revealed truth. The splash, or deluge, of sherry atop the dished-out soup breathes the final gift of life, of vivacity, into the dish, like a prince’s kiss. Technically optional, the sherry or equivalent is so critical that some food historians blame Prohibition for turtle soup’s decline in popularity in the United States. Turtle soup without sherry was like an orchestra without violas, hollow in the middle, and by repeal, diners had moved on.
Ultimately, turtle soup has a particular elegance only odd, old-fashioned things with a certain aura of ritual have around them—a sort of Zsa Zsa Gabor-like quality. Like lavender candy and raw oysters, turtle soup will not be for everyone, but we connoisseurs appreciate it as one of the many attainable luxuries that dress up a dinner out or a life well-lived.
One of my most location-specific “New Orleans” memories is of the morning after Hurricane Zeta whipped through, at a hair under Category 3 easily strong enough to knock out power for a while. With our homes dark, a friend and I went to the Quarter to seek out a restorative brunch and a phone chargeup at the great booze-and-breakfast mainstay, The Court of Two Sisters. Since it was something of an occasion, we treated ourselves to turtle soup, in defiance of our circumstances. We were disheveled and, brandishing our flickering phones, a bit mendicant, but we could play it off as gentlemen in distress over a serving of turtle soup (and an undisclosed number of Bloody Marys). Ham and eggs would have fed us as well and maybe even tasted as good, but they would never have crowned the memory like that well-remembered, sherry-topped breakfast of turtle soup.
