Green Turtle Orgy

From the mid-18th century to the early 19th century, there was no better way for an Englishman to spoil his guests and indulge like a king than to serve Green Turtle. It connected the British to the fruits of their exotic and expanding empire while also asserting an elitism of taste and wealth. Turtles were not only obscenely expensive and difficult to procure but were so enormous that only a palatial kitchen could manage to attempt cooking the sea creatures. Most of the turtles that ended up on the dining tables of the great and the good were captured in the West Indies and brought across the sea in wooden tanks, specially made for the purpose, and housed in the hull. They could weigh up to 500lb, a few were recorded as being longer than eight feet from fin to fin and were sold in the London markets for a small fortune.

For those who could afford the luxury, green turtle was served in its own outer shell, the calipash. Its blood was drained from the body first and then added later. They must have needed a group of servants, sweating and heaving, to carry the steaming upper shell into the dining rooms of London’s exclusive clubs and grand houses, while trying not to let the greenish juice slurp out onto the polished floors and expensive clothes of the guests. It was the pinnacle of the meal, the equivalent of earlier Kings eating roast swans with their feathers put back and pies full of live blackbirds. Yet, unlike those showy set pieces of home-grown fowl, turtle had an unusual green or yellow tinge to it’s jellyish flesh and the meat was strong and scented. Although the great green turtles were less fishy than their hawk nosed cousins, it could make the stomach of the uninitiated turn. Some justified this extravagance by espousing the enlivening health benefits of turtle, it could even cure impotency. Admiral George Anson, one of the first to bring turtle flesh to the metropolis, believed that the consumption of turtles had aided his scurvy ridden sailors back to health in America. They were first consumed on board ships by desperate, hungry sailors. Anson oversaw one of the first servings of a 300lb turtle at the fashionable gambling club, White’s in the 1750s.

I can imagine the long linen covered tables, cluttered with crystal goblets of fine french wine, ornate silver dishes and candles twisting up into the cavernous dining rooms. The grand chandeliers, tinkling above their heads, and the wood panelled rooms lined with fashionable Italianate landscapes and sombre Restoration portraits. The first courses have been cleared away and a huge, beautiful turtle shell lies upturned and steaming in the centre of the table, spanning its entire width. It lies upended under the admiring and hungry glances of those assembled. Hair piled high and dusted with grey powder, faces blanched and punctuated with beauty spots. Refined mouths red. I can imagine the bon ton seizing their implements of conquest — small, sharp-toothed saws and pliers to wrench open the fins. I can imagine them pushing aside their silks and their pearls and their diamonds as they plunge into the shell, some climb in and loll around. Gorging on the greenish flesh and scraping the huge shell clean. The sound of metal against bone. The oily juices running down their chins.

Critics of the time described it as a grotesque culinary orgy sweeping through the aristocracy. It represented the lack of morality and libertarian living. None of those against it considered the depleting stocks of turtles in the oceans. Green turtle was so popular that the turtler boats were having to go further and further south to plunder the stocks in the sea; turning the turtles upside down on the beaches where they laid their eggs and leaving them paddling in the air while they gathered the crew to pull them into open cages.

When I first looked into the eating of green turtle I couldn’t quite believe it. Was this culinary indulgence responsible for their near extinction? The sketch of a turtle being drained of blood and hanging upside down in a kitchen made me feel sick for days. And of course, it was yet another way to separate the poor from the wealthy, as the abundance of exotic and well cooked food can so often be. But it’s also the study of how extravagance and elitism resonates down the social structure. Mock Turtle Soup was an equally fascinating phenomenon. A thin, slimy broth, green with cabbage and cooked with a calf’s head to replicate the gelatinous texture of real turtle. The silver tureen dish placed in the centre of more modest homes with sheep brain and skull bobbing in it. It was a staple of the Victorian era. The mock turtle even appeared in Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland and the soup could be bought in tins right into the 20th Century.