[Sca-cooks] Turtle Soup, was: (LONG!) Dragon Dormant Baronial Investiture

[James Prescott]

At 21:30 -0500 2005-03-13, patrick.levesque at elf.mcgill.ca wrote:
>>  Medieval turtle soup? Recipe?
>
>  There are two recipes for turtles in the 'Ouverture de Cuisine'... (which has
>  been webbed by Thorvald - my apologies, I don't have the URL handy, since I'm
>  working from a printed copy). One of them can be seen as a turtle soup, stew,
>  or turtle in broth... I haven't obviously experimented on it yet.


The French version was actually webbed by Thomas Gloning -- I was
one of the people who helped with the transcription.

The English translations by me are (draft form):

170. To prepare a tortoise.

Take the tortoise, and slit the throat, and let it die, then
put it to boil so long that you can pull the shell away from
the flesh: then you will remove all the skin that you find,
and take the flesh and the eggs if there are any, and put it
to stew with good stock, and add a bit of mace, a bit of pepper
and rosemary, marjoram, mint and fresh butter, and salt, and
white wine or verjuice, and a fresh [sweet] lemon in slices,
and let it stew well thus, and serve.

171. Otherwise. [Tortoise]

When the tortoise is well cooked, fricassee it in butter, a
fresh [sweet] lemon cut into slices on top, or make a sauce
on top with some toasted white bread, and some ground white
[blanched?] almonds, and strain all well through cheesecloth,
add sugar and ginger, and boil it so that it is thick, and add
the fricasseed tortoise, and you will serve [it] thus.


Thorvald