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TURTLE SOUP
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
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87 turtle soup Sharon Stallworth Nossiter Soup is a significant cultural element of New Orleans tables, be it a delicate but flavorful opening course or a thick and filling main dish. Gumbo takes its place as a soup so special that it creates its own category . Creole vegetable“soup bunches,” composed of slices of cabbage, a turnip or two, carrots, parsley, and green onion, are as popular today in the city’s grocery stores as they were one hundred years ago at the local butcher shop.Adler’s, the century-old Canal Street jewelry store and purveyor of the accoutrements of traditional New Orleans entertaining (café brûlot bowls, oyster plates, and silver-plated hot-sauce holders), sells a set of soup bowls picturing indigenous New Orleans soups and inscribed with recipes from the city’s well-known restaurants : Antoine’s Creole Gumbo, Bon Ton Crawfish Bisque, Commander’s Palace Oyster and Artichoke Soup, and Galatoire’s Turtle Soup. The leading society hostesses of the Garden District, composing their ideal menus for the February 16, 1890, edition of the Daily Picayune, tended largely in the direction of asparagus soup; although one, Mrs. Samuel Delgado, suggested turtle soup as an admirable element of a cold-weather menu. The editors of The Picayune’s Creole Cookbook second edition of 1901, always eager to pontificate on the glories of New Orleans tables and their ancient ties to France (although culinary historian Jessica Harris deems the book“rooted in the creolized African-American tradition of New Orleans”), note that the Creole population, while dispensing with the morning cup of bouillon typical of a well-regulated French household, continued with the practice of a daily serving of soup at dinner , a happy custom which spread even into the other side of town, the muchdespised American sector. This custom continues: Galatoire’s general manager Melvin Rodrigue noted in 2005 that “many of the restaurant’s patrons do not consider dinner to be a complete meal without a soup course.” Longtime local turtle soup 88 food writer Tom Fitzmorris recently identified no fewer than twenty restaurants serving his favorite soups, among them two turtle soups and five gumbos. Other recommendations range from crab-and-corn to Vietnamese pho, Catalan zarzuela,oyster,lentil,and roasted garlic.The popularity of a range of soups, the newer offerings of creative chefs and immigrant populations combined with the traditional mainstays of Creole cuisine, reflects New Orleanians’openmindedness toward new foods and loyalty to traditional favorites. The most unusual of local favorites remains turtle soup—unusual if only because New Orleans is the only remaining outpost of a European-style turtle soup, once the darling of epicures and aristocracy, now fallen prey to changing tastes and dwindling supplies. Originally and most characteristically made with sea turtle, it is now dependent on fresh-water turtles as the marine turtle has been hunted to the point of endangerment. Its harvest, illegal in the United States since 1971, is tightly controlled around the world. Alligator snapping turtles and common snapping turtles from the eastern half of the United States now provide much of the meat for the commercial market in Louisiana. Earlier indigenous people of the Gulf Coast and the Caribbean islands, through which many Louisiana colonists passed, ate turtle, either its eggs or its meat or both. Noted food historian Waverly Root claims that the sea turtle“was so important for Gulf Coast Indians that it has been called the ‘buffalo of the Caribbean.’” Some thought that eating turtle meat before battle would protect them from injury, he wrote. Turtle broth was supposed to cure sore throats and was fed to babies. In the Caribbean, turtle soup was the staple of many ordinary eaters. But the English, with their West Indian plantations, brought enormous sea turtles to London in the mid-eighteenth century, live in tubs of seawater. Steaks of turtle meat and fins were at first exotic and then became a part of English and American cookery just as some of the first American cookbooks were being published. “To Dress a Turtle” appeared in Amelia Simmons’s influential American Cookery, the first cookbook written by an American, published in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1796. She also provided a recipe for mock turtle soup, calling it “To Dress a Calve’s Head. Turtle fashion.” Simmons lifted the instructions for turtle soup from Englishwoman Susannah Carter and her Frugal Housewife, but Simmons’s inclusion of them and the...