THE EDIBLE TURTLE

Taranaki Daily News, 7 January 1927, Page 8

THE EDIBLE TURTLE

YOUNG AND TENDER AT EIGHTY

Two tons of turtles, sea-monsters that weigh anything up to two or three hundred pounds apiece, go to the making of the turtle soup for the Lord Mayor’s ■banquet (writes David Neville in the Daily Mail).

They are shipped over from the Caribbean Sea alive, for the most part, and fed throughout the journey on tender fronds of seaweed to maintain their prime condition.

Only a very small portion of the turtle’s flesh appears in solid form in the soup. The squares that float so enticingly in it are the gelatinous, firm flesh that forms the inner lining of its outer shell or carapace.

Into the stock, however, go many other parts of the creature. The horny layers (which, in the case of the green or edible turtle are valueless) ate stripped off by scalding and rejected, but the flesh of the fins and the “steakmeat,” or muscle, which looks almost exactly like beefsteak, go into tho pot (with spices and mysterious herbs of many kinds whose secret is known only to the few cooks who have ever prepared this royal dish), to be strained out after their richness has been extracted.

The turtle-, according to those who cut it up, is the easiest of all things to carve. Nature has stamped it with a diagram, showing where the knife should run—the lines and ridges of its shell.

A young and tender turtle, the equivalent of a spring chicken, is usually about eighty years of age and weighs rather less than a cwt, but the great adults of three times that size may have lived for three centuries before the fatal day. There are, however, uses for the flesh of turtles besides the making of so-.ip. The fins, especially of the younger ones, are a great delicacy, and the “steakmeat” may be grilled. The oil, too, makes soap of an exceptionally flue quality. The green turtle's inedible cousin, the hawksbill, makes up for Ills uselessness as an article of diet by supplying a variety of valuable turtle shell.