To Dress a Turtle

History

To dress a turtle, in Amelia Simmons's American Cookery, is a day-long piece of butchery. Around nine in the morning the cook hangs the turtle up by its hind fins, cuts off the head and saves the blood, then separates the callapach from the callapee — the back shell from the belly — down to the shoulders to reach and clean the entrails. The meat of the fins, back and belly is scalded, skinned and cut into pieces about the breadth of a card, then layered in deep brown-ware dishes with butter, a pounded salt-and-cayenne seasoning, dried sweet herbs, boiled turtle blood and veal forcemeat balls; a gill of Madeira goes into each dish, eggs are broken over the top to keep the meat from scorching, shredded parsley is shaken over to green it, and the whole is baked in an oven hot enough for bread. Its companion, to dress a calf's head turtle fashion, reaches for the same flavors without the turtle: the head, feet and pluck are boiled and sliced, layered with veal and a cayenne-and-sweet-herb seasoning and stewed in their own liquor; veal forcemeat balls are fried brown, the chopped brains and a pint of wine are stirred through, and it is served from tureens with lemon and hard-boiled eggs.

The two recipes are the luxury and its echo. Mock turtle was the deliberate imitation, using calf's head and organ meats to stand in for the real thing, and it can be dated closely in the English record. Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery carries only the genuine turtle, dressed the West India way, through its editions of 1747, 1751 and 1755. A receipt for mock turtle first appears in the appendix to the 1758 edition, and it opens by telling the cook to take a calf's head and scald off the hair as she would a pig's. Simmons, writing in Hartford nearly forty years later, prints both the feast and its stand-in a few pages apart.

The book prints the method and nothing of the table it was meant for: it does not say who in the new republic laid out such a dish, nor whether the households that owned this cookbook were more likely to meet a live sea turtle or, far more often, the calf's head dressed to stand in its place.

What we could not establish is the trade behind the fashion. The dates an earlier version of this note carried — that green sea turtle began arriving in England from the West Indies in the 1740s, that as many as fifteen thousand were shipped live, and that turtle soup was never absent from a London civic banquet between 1761 and 1825 — we learned from popular reference and food-writing sources, and we were unable to locate the evidence they rest on.

Ingredients

• 1 turtle
• 2/3 part salt
• 1/3 part cayenne, black pepper, nutmeg and mace
• sweet herbs
• 1/4 pound butter
• turtle blood
• forcemeat balls
• 1 gill Madeira wine
• 6 eggs
• handful shredded parsley

Instructions

1. Fill a kettle with enough water to scald the shells and fins.
2. About nine o'clock, hang the turtle by the hind fins, cut off the head, and save the blood.
3. With a sharp knife, separate the back shell (callapach) from the belly (callapee) down to the shoulders to reach the entrails.
4. Take out and clean the entrails, discarding the gall carefully so it does not break, cutting it from the liver.
5. Open the guts end to end, wash them, and draw them through a woolen cloth in warm water to remove the slime, then hold in cold water.
6. Cut the entrails small to mix later with the meat.
7. Cut away the fore fins at the upper joint, scald them, peel off the loose skin, and cut into small pieces.
8. Cut the meat from the belly and clean the back of lungs and kidneys, cutting that meat into walnut-sized pieces.
9. Scald the back and belly pieces, pull off the shell and yellow skin, and cut them into card-sized pieces; wash and heap each part separately.
10. Mix a seasoning of two-thirds salt to one-third cayenne, black pepper, nutmeg, and mace pounded fine, proportioned to about three spoonfuls per twelve pounds of meat.
11. Dry and rub fine some sweet herbs such as thyme and savory.
12. In each deep brown-ware dish, put a quarter pound butter, then the coarsest meat, then equal portions of each parcel of meat, strewing sweet herbs between layers.
13. Fill each dish to within an inch and a half or two inches of the top.
14. Boil the turtle's blood and add it, then lay on veal forcemeat balls seasoned like the turtle.
15. Add a gill of Madeira wine and as much water as each dish will hold.
16. Break five or six eggs over the top to keep the meat from scorching and shake on shredded parsley.
17. Bake in an oven hot enough to bake bread for one and a half to two hours, according to the size of the dishes.