47. WEIRD FOOD: Cuffy Cockroach’s Sea Turtle Soup

People began eating turtle soup in the 1700s, and they kept eating it through the early 1900s. Companies like Campbell’s and Heinz made canned turtle soup (and something called mock turtle soup). And it wasn’t just available. It was a real culinary obsession. In the early days, there would be these big, elaborate parties, called Turtle Frolics, where people would get together to enjoy it. Including a notable Turtle Frolic in Newport, prepared and served by a talented chef named Cuffy Cockroach. 

Episode Source Material: 

• Reminiscences of Newport - George Champlin Mason - Google Books 1884 
• A Newport Rhode Island Turtle Feast, 1767 – Afroculinaria
• Turtle Soup: From Class to Mass to Aghast - JSTOR Daily
• The Turtles of Philadelphia's Culinary Past
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• One of New York's Queer Institutions | New York Times
• Foodways to Freedom: African Heritage Entrepreneurs in 18th- and 19th-Century Rhode Island – The Rhode Island Historical Society
• African Americans in Rhode Island Who Used Food to Achieve Independence - Online Review of Rhode Island History
• Encyclopedia of African American Business
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• Black Southern Caterers: A History of Enterprise and Culinary Good Taste
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• A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America
• Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island
• The Negro in Rhode Island: His Past, Present, and Future
• Separate and Sometimes Equal: African Burials in Colonial Newport
• Newport's Turtle Party Slows Hectic Yule Pace - Los Angeles Times
• 1776 Season 1 Episode 4
• Colonial Dames and Good Wives | Alice Morse Earle | 1895
• 50 Years of Christmas in Newport
• An Archaeology of Manners: The Polite World of the Merchant Elite of Colonial Massachusetts | Lorinda B. R. Goodwin
• What Ever Happened to Turtle Soup?
• Turtle soup - Wikipedia
• Why Don't People Eat Turtle Soup Anymore?
• The End of Turtle Soup | History Today
• Our Taste For Turtle Soup Nearly Wiped Out Terrapins. Then Prohibition Saved Them : The Salt : NPR
• A ban on trapping the diamondback terrapin passes after advocates stick their necks out – Baltimore Sun
• How America Fell Into—and Out of—Love With Mock Turtle Soup.
• From Delicacy to Decline: A Tale of the Diamond-Backed Terrapin | Virginia DWR
• Hoboken Turtle Club | New York Times
• Journal of A Residence in America | Frances Anne Butler
• Primer 0013: So Rich and So Green: The History of Turtle Soup