Mythologies of the Eighteenth Century Turtle Feast

India Aurora Mandelkern PCCBS PAPER “Mythologies of the Turtle Feast in 18th Century England” From calipash to calipee, the green sea turtle was without doubt the most expensive, status-laden, and morally contested feat of Enlightenment cuisine.  Virtually unknown as human food before mid-century, the amphibious reptile quickly became an enduring symbol of both refined taste and savage indulgence, even though the vast majority of the Georgian public had never seen, let alone eaten one. So powerful was the association between turtle and English culinary refinement that even an unabashed imitation –– “mock turtle” –– became respectable middle class fare. But despite the ubiquity of the turtle feast in 18th century print culture, we know very little about what these feasts meant. See Diane Kirkby’s and Tanja Luckins’s Dining on Turtles: Food Feasts and Drinking in History (London: Palgrave, 2007) p.3. “Dining on turtle,” they write, “brought from the Caribbean to cold wet England, in an elaborate ritual of prestige and taste, required systems of trade and communication, transport, monetary exchange and knowledge of cooking techniques that came together at that historical moment to create that particular experience.” Unfortunately, this is the extent of their analysis of turtle feasting. This paper examines these popular mythologies –– gleaned from natural histories, letters, and newspapers –– as a way to unpack the politics of the 18th century palate. As turtle’s status as human food evolved, so too did the stakes of its collective consumption. These representations call attention to the textured meanings of “taste” used as both a measurement of civility as well as an internal moral failing. It is unclear when the first sea turtle was consumed in England, if we can even call it a turtle. (Early modern naturalists generally referred to it as a “sea-tortoise”; the colonists who caught them in the West Indies, known as “turtlers,” apparently popularized the word.) In 1682, the naturalist Thomas Amy categorized three types of them: the hawk’s-bill, which had a nice shell –– “clearer and better clouded than any other” –– the green turtle, which made up in flavor what it lacked in appearance –– and the loggerhead turtle, which, according to one travel writer, “has neither good shell [n]or flesh, so is little minded or regarded.” Thomas Amy, A Compleat Discovery of the State of Carolina, in the Year 1682 (London, 1682.) In the 18th century they add a fourth kind, the “trunk turtle” which is popularly described as “rank and unwholesome” Despite these rather straightforward distinctions, classifying the sea turtle was hardly business as usual. Seventeenth century natural historians tentatively grouped it with sea-creatures such as prawns, fish, lobsters, and oysters, but its three hearts, one natural historian observed, have “caused some to philosophize on its amphibious nature.” In 1789, William Cullen classified it as an amphibian, but testudo mydas was its own class. Buffon said the hands had five fingers in natural history of birds, fish, insects, and reptiles. Not until the century’s end do I find mention of the age of a turtle, in George Shaw’s Cimelia Physica: Figures of Rare and Curious Quadrupeds (London, 1798.) Shaw states that a turtle brought over in 1633 and living until 1753 at Lambeth in a private garden p.54. Colloquial 18th century accounts refer to it as a fish. In 1758, Linneaus labeled it testuda mydas. Indeed, Amy pointed out, the animal “swims like a fish, lays eggs like a fowl, and feeds on grass like an ox.” (It also apparently stayed alive for up to nine hours even after it had been cut in half, entrancing many early modern naturalists.) Mary Douglas would have had a field day. Classifying turtle according to its taste was no easier. Some thought it tasted like beef, others like chicken, and still others described its fat as exactly like bone marrow –– it supposedly had the “consistency of butter” –– that is, if you could get past the otherworldly color and fishy “musk-like” smell. As early modern medical wisdom held that flavor was closely linked to a substance’s medicinal virtues, physicians were equally baffled when came to the turtle’s effects on one’s health. Some considered it a useful anti-venereal and anti-scorbutic well-suited to the oppressive and highly infectious climate of the West Indies. But they were quick to admit that it had some unpleasant side effects, ranging from infecting the blood to turning one’s skin and one’s urine yellow. Eating it also turned his urine “yellowish-green, and oily.” In his encyclopedic two-part natural history of the West Indies, Dr. Hans Sloane deemed green turtles “very good victuals, and sustain a great many, especially of the poorer sort on the island.” Sloane believed green turtles superior to the other breeds because they did not taste “fishy,” although he insisted that smaller land turtles were in fact “more delicate food.” Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, vol. 1 (London, 1707). Indeed, Sloane made clear that turtle was more of a necessity than a choice for English colonists, as beef and veal raised in Jamaica tasted terrible, cost four times as much, and rotted in a matter of hours. Turtle flesh, meanwhile, could be salted and barreled, peppered and baked, or reduced into a nourishing broth. It was versatile when it needed to be. But only provisionally did it count as food. Well before they became food to polite society, turtles were edible curiosities for literary consumption. A sea turtle containing “three score” eggs inside was a welcome surprise for Robinson Crusoe after he had spent nearly nine months subsisting on island goats and fowls. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (London, 1726) p. 43.  Crusoe found the turtle flesh “the most savoury or pleasant that ever I tasted in my life.” Inquisitive readers could even examine real turtle shells on display at Don Saltero’s Coffee House. See “The Rarities display’d at Don Saltero’s coffee house” (London, 1750?).  Two (ostensibly stuffed) turtles emerging out of shells and one (decapitated) turtle head are included in the catalogue.  For more on Don Saltero’s as a permanent exhibition of curiosities, see chapter five in Brian Cowan’s The Social Life of Coffee: the Emergence of the British Coffee House (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).  And while one weekly newspaper reported a turtle delivered to and enjoyed by the Royal Family in 1728, this did not immediately accord the turtle noble status. In Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer, Saturday, Oct 19, 1728. George II had enjoyed the prototypical alimentary symbols of kingship at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet the previous year –– red deer, ortolans and lampreys –– but the sea turtle was conspicuously absent. All archival material pertaining to the Lord Mayor’s Banquet and the Corporation of London can be found at the London Metropolitan Archives, Clerkenwell.    The elevation of turtle to haute cuisine happened rather abruptly in the early 1750s. And perhaps no one did more to mythologize it among London elites than did Baron George Anson (1697-1762), who in 1740 was dispatched to attack Spanish possessions in the Caribbean during the War of Jenkins Ear.  Anson’s successes were mixed.  While he succeeded in capturing a Spanish galleon full of silver, making himself a peer, a celebrity, and a very rich man, his crew did not fare so well.  Only 188 out of 1900 men returned to England with him after his circumnavigation of the globe in 1744, the majority succumbed to starvation or scurvy. N.A.M Roger, “George Anson” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford University Press, 2004).  As soon as he returned, several accounts of Anson’s voyage were printed and circulated for the reading public’s pleasure. Some of them dwelled on the less appetizing parts of the trip –– men ate seals (which also apparently tasted like beef) sea lions, and seaweed. Turtle, like it had for Sloane, was depicted as emergency relief, coming up only insofar that men were forced to drink its blood when they couldn’t find any fresh water. See An Authentic account of Commodore Anson’s expedition (London, 1744). That same year, however, Anson’s official chaplain, Richard Walter, published a much lengthier and embellished first-hand account of the voyage, where he described the sea turtle as a delicacy as well as a nutritional miracle.  Exhausted and scurvy-ridden while stationed in Quibo (modern day Coiba off the coast of Panama) the ailing crew were purportedly nourished back to health by green sea turtles “in the greatest plenty and perfection,” with “pleasant and salubrious” flesh, “white, and exceedingly sweet.” John Philips, Midshipman, An Authentic Journal of the late expedition under Commodore Anson” (London, 1744).   Over the four years they took to travel around the world, Anson’s crew had been out of necessity obliged to try almost every exotic animal out there –- from iguanas to penguins –– but turtle was unquestionably the tastiest. Over the four months that they subsisted on nothing but fresh turtle meat, Walter pointed out, the crew stayed in good spirits, and only two men died. But Walter’s depiction of this convivial turtle-feast made it clear that turtle nourished more than just the body. For the curious, self-reliant and freedom-loving British sailors, it was love at first bite.  On the other hand, the captured Spanish prisoners (being naturally “superstitious” and “prejudiced,” Walter observed) were reluctant to indulge, believing turtle to be poisonous. Richard Walter, A Voyage Around the World, in the years MDCCXL, Vol. 2, (London, 1748) p. 39.  But after observing that none of the English died from this modification to their diet, Walter wrote: “…they at last got so far the better of their aversion, as to be persuaded to taste it, to which the absence of all other kinds of fresh provisions might not a little contribute.  However it was with great reluctance, and very sparingly, that they first began to eat of it, but the relish improving upon them by degrees, they at last grew extremely fond of it, and preferred it to every other kind of food, and often felicitated each other on the happy experience they had acquired, and the luxurious and plentiful repasts it would always be in their power to procure, when they should again return back to their country.” Walter, ibid. In fact, after licking their lips with turtle grease, the Spanish considered the meal “more delicious to the palate than any their haughty lords and masters could indulge in,” which Walter deemed “doubtless … the most fortunate [circumstance] that could befall them.”  In this context, communal turtle feasting seemed to unmask the Spanish Empire’s fanaticism and cruelty. The food’s taste conveyed to the sailors knowledge of their miserable and unenlightened existence prior to British capture. Sensual enjoyment of the meat not only concretized the reality of their prior suffering, but it also replaced a cruel despotic system with a physically and spiritually nourishing one based on self-reliance and sociability. Indeed, turtle-catching required teamwork; Anson dispatched “runners” to scout the beach and turn the animals on their backs before they could crawl back into the ocean, whereupon a larger crew could come and lug them back to the ship. “We caught [by this method] what quantity we pleased with great facility,” Walter wrote. This fraternal spirit was only reinforced by the setting of the communal feast, which took place on an uninhabited sun-drenched beach without law, women, or cookery. Walter’s account of the voyage became a huge hit, going into dozens of editions over the 18th and 19th centuries. And while I cannot claim that this myth was singlehandedly responsible for whetting the British public’s palate for turtle, in the following years, both George Anson and the sea turtle reciprocally reinforced each other’s myths. In 1754, the Whitehall Evening Post or London Intelligencer reported that Lord Anson (he was now First Lord of the Admiralty) had gifted a three hundred pound turtle to the gentlemen of White’s Chocolate House, one of the most notorious and exclusive gambling clubs in London. Two months later he gifted another one to the Royal Society’s dining club, then presided over by the Earl of Macclesfield. Both of these clubs were overwhelmingly aristocratic in composition (in fact, their memberships overlapped) and enjoyed reputations for eating sumptuous meals. The gentlemen of White’s, one satirist observed, “are no less adept in the science of Eating than Gaming,” while the Royal Society’s club had even established special provisions honoring donors of venison, turtle, and beef. While this was not the first time that the Royal Philosophers got the chance to feast on such a treat, they had experienced more than their share of turtle-related mishaps: once the turtle died as it came up the channel (the guy who promised it was not invited back) Anson’s visit to the Royal Society was so highly anticipated that news of his turtle was sent out by penny post. Twenty-eight men –– a record turnout –– showed up that afternoon. At the dinner, his health was toasted in claret in thanks for his "magnificent present." A note in the Thursday’s Club dinner books dated September 2, 1754 stated the penny post letters to the members on account of Anson’s turtle cost the club 2 shillings.  Thursday’s Club Dinner Books, RSC Papers, Royal Society Archives.   These turtle feasts attracted attention and excitement for several reasons. Communal consumption of this quasi-patriotic luxury testified to the limitless possibilities offered by the expanding Empire.  The unique taste allowed club members to experience vicariously Anson’s overseas adventures and to commemorate the edible tool that capacitated his victory over the Spanish. But turtle feasting was more than a political act. Just as it had on the uninhabited beaches of Coiba, feasting in an all-male clubbable context lubricated masculine discourse free from the trappings of polite civility. Indeed, the West-Indian sea turtle –- being a natural repast comparable only to the roast beef of England in size –– painted a sharp contrast to the refined cullises, puptons and frivolous little “kickshaws” prepared by overpaid French cooks. Unlike the refined French “restaurants” or “essences” concentrated into dainty dishes, the imported turtles were so large that they often dwarfed the kitchens and dining rooms, sometimes causing commotion. The Royal Society club was none too pleased when news of another club feasting on a 400 pounder forced them to leave their usual club-room. The challenge of fitting Anson’s gift into the White’s Club oven was found newsworthy by several different papers. We shouldn’t assume that preoccupations with the turtle’s size went hand in hand with gluttonous greed. Feasting in early modern England was understood as an occasion for hospitality, and mid-century turtle chroniclers always stressed this fact. Newspaper accounts often boast about the number of people sated by a single animal.  See, for example, the London Evening Post, Oct 5-Oct 8, 1754 (London, England) Issue 4198.  According to contemporary cookbooks, one thirty-pound turtle could create five to six different dishes and feed a large family; it was the epitome of head to tail cooking.  Throughout the 1750s, newspapers reported a number of enormous turtles brought into England, some of which reputedly clocked in at 500 pounds and measured eight feet from fin to fin. See, for example the London Magazine, or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer (London, 1760). In 1754 for example, the London Evening Post reported that a couple of French fishermen off of the Ile de Ré had allegedly caught a turtle weighing nearly 800 pounds. London Evening Post (London, England) October 5 1754, Issue 4198.  But this “news” was reported in several other papers too. The head alone weighed 25 pounds, a single fin weighed 12; “the whole community made four plentiful dinners of the liver alone.” Indeed, even the shell worked as a built in communal bowl, evidencing an authentic form of fellowship that seemed to precede history and time. In a society bedeviled by artifice and foppery at every turn, feasting on sea turtle consecrated authentic social bonds among men. These private club dinners mythologized the turtle as an aristocratic delicacy, even though its clientele soon extended beyond the aristocratic. “Turtle feasting is relished on both sides of the town,” one weekly proclaimed, as the dish became the chosen treat of City councilmen as well as Westminster politicians. See George Colman’s The Connoisseur, by Mr. Town, no. 19 (London, 1756) pp. 110-115. So coveted did turtle become that some feared it might usurp roast beef’s place as the quintessential English food. But as it transitioned from an exotic panacea to a luxury commodity available for purchase, the turtle-feast became increasingly morally questionable. In 1755, the weekly periodical The World published a satirical “insider’s account” of an English turtle-feast, likening it to an unnatural libertine bacchanal rather than a rational sociable exercise. If you’d like to read it yourself, the article is called “A Humourous Account of a Turtle Feast and a Turtle Eater,” in The World 123, May 8, 1755. Feasting now had scripted rites and rituals of its own, from loose, toga-like “turtle clothes” to “saws, chisels and instruments” designed to scrape the calipash dry. Did “turtle clothes” actually exist?  I have yet to find any evidence of real turtle eating uniform.  Most likely this simply meant loose-fitting clothes.  The only other reference I have found comes from “A Scene of Shades” published in the General Evening Post, October 11, 1770.  This article tells the story of fictional “Common Councilman Guzzledown” who announces, “because I knew there was to be a great deal of turtle, I put on my light drab frock and gold-laced scarlet waistcoat that laces down the back.” If you are a textile historian with any knowledge of 18th century turtle-clothes, please get in touch! Instead of feeding on seaweed or algae, these naturally vegetarian creatures allegedly fattened in England on a leg of mutton per day. The feast, moreover, turned men (and women – a noteworthy addition) into figurative beasts.  “The plunderers were sensible to no call but their own appetites,” the narrator observed, chowing down with “eagerness” and “rapacity,” abandoning all pretentions of hospitality or restraint. This account isn't the only turtle-feast to turn men into ravaging monsters with no sense of hospitality.  In 1770, a disappointed guest at a corporation dinner wrote an angry letter to the General Evening Post, reporting that entire tables received only empty platters and empty turtle shells because the people served first had eaten it all.   In the mouths of those unable to sublimate corporeal appetite to polite taste, the turtle became construed as a mind-altering substance rather than a meal. After a bad day in the market, one fictional stockbroker finds temporary solace in a turtle seasoned with cayenne pepper, which “operated [upon him] so strongly, that his heart was dilated [and] his spirits were exhilarated.” John Hall Stevenson, Yorick's Sentimental Journey, continued vol 2, (London, 1774) 27. When it came to the turtle overdoses, satirists had a field day.  In George Lyttleton’s Dialogues of the Dead, historical epicure Charles Darteneuf fantasized about coming back to life simply to taste a turtle –– what he called the “very best of all foods” –– and pledged “to kill myself by the Quantity of it I would eat before the next morning.” George Lyttelton, Dialogues of the Dead (London, 1760).  Darteneuf actually existed; he was a member of the Kit Kat club and died before turtle-eating had penetrated Great Britain.  You can find out more about him in Philip Carter's article "Charles Dartiquenave," Oxford Dictionary of Nationanl Biography, online edn, Jan, 2008.    While the turtle’s taste had strengthened social bonds among Anson’s crew, the metropolitan turtle-addict rarely concerned himself with flavor or his health. Instead, he boasted of the quantities he could consume or lent his crest to a so-called “turtle-house.” One 1796 moralist linked the turtle-connoisseur to an “idolotor” who “worshipped the culinary image wherever he put it up.” William Cole, The Contradiction (London, 1796). And instead of nourishing fellowship or camaraderie, the men associated with the metropolitan feast often figuratively metamorphosed into turtles themselves: “Sir Greenfin Calipash,” “Councilmen Guzzledown” and “Dr. Feastlove” became common satiric jabs. It was perhaps due to all this negative press that the famous Scottish inventor James Watt felt the need to justify his turtle dinners with the aristocratic Royal Society club, attesting in a 1780 letter that “never was turtle eaten with greater sobriety and temperance, or more good fellowship.” Quoted in John Timbs, Clubs and Club Life, with Anecdotes of its famous Coffee Houses (London, 1899) p. 61. Whether turtle eating exemplified polite connoisseurship or indulgent excess had a lot to do with the kind of people who were eating it. As turtle became the epicure’s status symbol, commanding up to four and a half shillings a pound and a slew of classifieds printed in the papers, popular stories no longer depicted its delicious restorative qualities. Instead, a taste for turtle signified a corrupted and vitiated palate habituated to eating unnatural and disgusting foods. For if turtle became accepted as an English dish, many ventured, what exotic animal might next become food for Englishmen? In Dialogues of the Dead, the notorious Roman glutton Apicius comforts Darteneuf (despondant that he had never tasted turtle) with the knowledge that “as you have eat[en] Delicacies that I have never tasted, so the next age will eat something unknown the to present. New discoveries will be made, and new delicacies brought from other parts of the world.” And if corrupt Englishmen could develop a taste for turtle, moralists asked, what was to prevent alligator from becoming the next culinary sensation? Increasingly, I’ve found that stories printed in newspapers claimed that the honest and virtuous man had no taste for turtle at all. “Poor Carlton’s stomach was so nearly turn’d by the smell and appearance of the calipash and calipee,” the musician John Marsh wrote in his diary in 1787, “that he had to put his head out the window to breathe. This entry was dated August 22, 1787 in John Marsh Journals: The Life and Times of a Gentleman Composer (New York: Pendragon Press, 1998) p. 410. One early 19th century account, penned by a provincial commoner, insisted that “[t]he green fat … made me sick enough to look at, let alone the eating of it.” “The Novice in Town: Giles Grentree to his Cousin George Gamble” in The Atheneum: or, Spirit of the English Magazines (1817-1833). From provisional food to spiritual restorative to object of alimentary desire, we must ask ourselves why the turtle feast became such a powerful myth. For those capable of sacrificing the individual appetite to the civic good, eating an exotic food such as sea turtle could provide mental clarity, enlightened conversation, and concretize social bonds among men. Yet for those who ate for the sake of pleasing the palate, connoisseurship of turtle became a sign of moral failing and loss of reason –– that turned back the clock on the civilizing process. The turtle reminded consumers that eating had high moral stakes. But the turtle-feast also demonstrates the degree to which “taste” functioned as an incredibly unstable mark of identity in 18th century society –– for the eater as well as the eaten. While ‘taste’ could sacralize consumption for the already civilized, the gradual commodification of the turtle as a luxury food coincided with a new philosophy of taste preferences that held an individual’s tastes to be increasingly fixed, impermeable, and innate. 1