![]() "Every menu we've ever seen, back to the '40s and '50s, has turtle soup on it," says Ti Martin, co-proprietor of Commander's Palace, a historic restaurant in New Orleans' Garden District, where the dish is still on offer.Īs children, Martin and her sister and co-proprietor, Lally Brennan, would name and play with the snapping turtles that arrived alive at the restaurant before they were sent to the kitchen. It's a recipe that still shows up at a handful of restaurants in the East and South, with one big change: Following decades of unregulated overharvesting, the now protected diamondback terrapin, prized for its sweet, white meat, has been replaced by farm-raised alligator snapping turtles. Though terrapin was occasionally prepared as "steaks," soup made with cream, butter and a healthy dose of sherry or Madeira wine was the gold standard of turtle dishes. Heinz and Campbell's also jumped on the terrapin train, marketing their canned turtle soups (and "mock" turtle soups made of calf's head) to the hoi polloi, for whom exorbitant prices left actual terrapin soup out of reach. Recipes for terrapin soup appear in cookbooks like the 1902 tome on food and household management, Mrs. Meanwhile, middle-class housewives tried their hand at turtle, too. The moneyed set would dine on the dish du jour at popular " turtle frolics," large feasts where crowds slurped massive vats of terrapin soup, and at expensive restaurants and private clubs in New York, Washington, Philadelphia and Baltimore. We don't really know "how and why terrapins became a gourmet item," biologist and diamondback authority Barbara Brennessel told me in an email sent from the marshes of Massachusetts, where she's monitoring the terrapin nesting season. Suddenly, the little turtle began to show up on tables at Andrew Jackson's White House and New York's famous Delmonicos, once considered the best restaurant in the country. Even as late as the Civil War, Confederate soldiers were supplementing their meager rations with the abundant terrapin.īy the mid-19th century, though, something had fundamentally changed. Cheap and plentiful, the Diamondback was also important to the diet of enslaved African Americans forced to live along the southern coast. Terrapin, a name derived from a hodgepodge of the Algonquin, Abenaki and Delaware words for "edible" or "good-tasting turtle," had been part of the Native American diet for centuries. "Sherry was a key ingredient in terrapin soup without access to sherry, the popularity of the soup plummeted."īetween the mid-1800s and 1920s, the diamondback terrapin was firmly lodged in the hearts and stomachs of the wealthy and powerful at the top of the American food chain. Constitution," says Maria Cathell, executive director of the Museum of Chincoteague, an island off the Virginia coast with a robust terrapin trade at the turn of the 20th century. "Prohibition impacted the terrapin industry in the entire country in 1919 with the 18th Amendment to the U.S.
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