What Happened to Turtle Soup? How a Dish Became a Delicacy Then Disappeared

If you walked into an upscale New York City restaurant 150 years ago, there was one staple you’d be almost certain to see on the menu: turtle soup.

Even beyond white tablecloth establishments, the love for this dish extended everywhere. President William Howard Taft hired a White House chef specifically to make turtle soup. Campbell’s sold cans of mock turtle soup. And iconic cookbookThe Joy of Cooking featured a turtle soup recipe as recently as 1974.

But unlike some other food trends you may be familiar with — hello, cake pops in the 2010s —  turtle soup wasn’t a short-lived fad that lasted for only a few years, and turtle has a long history in American food culture.

Turtle meat was part of Indigenous people’s diets in both North America and the Caribbean before Europeans ever arrived, and colonists in turn learned they could eat the animals.

At first, Europeans valued turtle meat as an inexpensive ingredient — it was used by sailors for easy sustenance, or as a protein for enslaved people in the colonies —  but it eventually became considered a delicacy, and Americans spooned bowls of turtle soup as a sign of status from the 18th through 20th centuries. So what happened after two hundred years of popularity?

Overfishing is to blame, but so are changing tastes.

What is turtle soup?

In its first iteration across the United States, turtle soup was typically made with green sea turtles, which lent the dish its signature viscous texture that turned gelatinous as it cooled.

European sailors brought Caribbean sea turtles back home at least as early as the 1700s, and the British experimented with preparations of the animal, ranging from simmering its fins in broth to making steaks.

Their love of the ingredient and recipes for cooking it eventually found their way back to American plates, where it was even easier access to the reptiles. Although it’s listed on menus in the 1840s (around when restaurants first started using menus in the U.S.), turtle soup is clearly documented as a popular delicacy beginning in the mid 1700s.

Breaking down a sea turtle to make soup was a celebratory — and messy — affair. In New York City, restaurants even advertised when a new one arrived. “When it showed up, the green turtle made a soup,” Henry Voigt, a historian with a collection of over 10,000 historical American menus, recounts to Food & Wine. “Can you imagine? A 300-pound turtle and you're going to butcher this thing in the kitchen. I can’t imagine.” 

A recipe from the 1880s in journalist and food critic William Grimes’ book Appetite City; The Culinary History of New York spells out exactly how this was done. The turtle was butchered and drained, then a stock was made with its organ meat, pork and veal knuckles, onions, turnips, carrots, and spices including bay leaves and allspice. After the meat was boiled and separated from the shell and bones, it was added to the broth with red pepper, Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, and sherry.

But as popular as green turtle soup was across the country, it wasn’t always available. To satisfy their cravings, eager diners could order mock turtle soup instead, which substituted its namesake meat with more accessible and inexpensive alternatives like calf’s head.

“Mock turtle soup (made with calf's head or veal) was a kind of faux-genteel, budget-conscious dish, much as you might substitute pork cutlets for veal scallopini now,” Dr. Paul Freedman, a food historian and professor of history at Yale University, tells Food & Wine.

The calf’s head gave the soup the same gelatinous quality as the green sea turtle, but it was a distinctly different food. Voigt notes that “Nobody would be fooled. I think the mock turtle soup was a dish on its own.” 

Mock turtle soup grew its own dedicated following. The dish became so well-known it was referenced in Lewis Carroll’s original Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as a character named “Mock Turtle.” And Andy Warhol even said mock turtle was his favorite rendition of Campbell’s canned soups.

The popularity of turtle soup endangered more than one species of turtle

Even though mock turtle soup made this dish more widely available, real turtle soup maintained its status as a coveted delicacy. As Americans feasted on bowls of their favorite high-end menu item, green sea turtles became increasingly rare, with populations starting to dwindle by the 1820s. In the 1890s, the price of green turtles had doubled in New York City compared to what they had cost just five years earlier. 

Green sea turtles weren't the only turtle or tortoise available for people to cook, but they had built a reputation as a sign of luxury. During the 19th century, snapping turtles were part of enslaved folks’ diets in some areas of the country. But to satiate the country’s appetite for sea turtles, Americans turned to one of the animal’s other relatives: terrapin. These smaller turtles commonly live in brackish waters, and the most sought-after species of the 1800s was diamondback terrapin sourced from the Chesapeake Bay. The diamondback was historically also eaten by enslaved people along the East Coast of the U.S.

“No dish was more prestigious than terrapin in the 19th-century United States,” Freedman writes in his 2020 book Man-Eating Monsters: Anthropocentrism and Popular Culture. Like green sea turtle, terrapin was typically served as a thick soup (like a chowder), and terrapin stew was even on the menu for Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration ball.

Despite its popularity, America’s love affair with terrapin didn’t last. The turtles were quickly overfished, and development along the East Coast destroyed and polluted their natural habitats. Terrapins were already rare by 1900, began disappearing from menus in the 1920s, and by the 1950s, terrapin dishes were few and far between.

Diminishing populations of sea turtles and terrapins made it increasingly difficult to find real turtle soup. But surprisingly, as the original dish became scarce, so did mock turtle soup. 

“It's probably related to both the textures and the taste,” Voigt says, explaining that Americans no longer desire gelatinous textures as much as they used to. He points to a few other once-widespread dishes that have now become less common as evidence that flavor preferences have changed, like offal, chicken liver, and whortleberries.

“We tend to be extremely narrow in our sense of what is desirable,” Freedman details. “Things of the relatively recent past — organ meat, for example — are now shunned.”

Even if American palates were still oriented towards the old school recipes for turtle soup, the green sea turtle has been designated as an endangered species since 1978, and terrapin populations are still considered vulnerable today. But for anyone who is craving something akin to this traditional delicacy, you can head to Louisiana to get a taste of the turtle soup that’s still part of its current culinary scene.

Can you still try turtle soup?

If you do try turtle, you’ll find it doesn’t quite taste like fish. It’s closer to a meat in its flavor and texture, falling somewhere between chicken and veal. Some people say it tastes like alligator meat, which is also often compared to chicken. 

“People worry about it being gamey, and it really isn't,” Melvin Rodrigue, the president of iconic New Orleans restaurant Galatoire's, explains to Food & Wine. The institution has served turtle soup since its founding in 1905, and still has it on the menu. Rodrigue says it’s one of the restaurant’s most popular dishes among tourists and locals alike. 

Turtle soup has long been a part of New Orleans' Creole cuisine, and early gumbos from the 18th century even used sea turtle broth. But the city’s version of turtle soup is usually — and always today — made with the common snapping turtle. Several other old-school New Orleans restaurants still serve authentic turtle soup, including Brennan’s, Mandina’s, and Commander's Palace.

Galatoire’s sources its turtle meat from local snapping turtle farms and makes the soup with ground turtle meat, beef broth, onion, bell pepper, celery, and a brown roux as the base. The restaurant finishes the dish with hard boiled eggs, lemon juice, and sherry. Rodrigue describes the soup as “approachable” due to its beef broth base. The restaurant’s recipe does share some similarities with historic versions of turtle soup — like the sherry — but it’s a good deal less gelatinous.

As for mock turtle soup, you can find that in New Orleans too, and even grab a quart from local grocery Langenstein’s to take home — its recipe uses a mix of pork, veal, and roasted turkey. And for anyone not in the area, you can still buy it in a can.