Snapping Turtle Soup

I: The 50’s


Our family moved into Park Rapids in 1957. My best friend there, Charlene Hensel, lived across the street. Her family was Catholic. This was back when Masses were in Latin, ecumenism as a movement hadn’t started, and all good Catholics didn’t touch meat on Fridays. As a Protestant, I just didn’t understand that. Fish was OK, and didn’t that mean there were eating the “meat” of the fish? Eggs were OK, and wasn’t that just embryonic meat? But they didn’t question - at least not where I could hear - they just followed. And that provided our sleepy neighborhood with some of its best summer entertainment.

Turtles were on the OK list for Friday, and Charlene’s dad had a skill for bringing them home. It was always the biggest, surliest, dare-I-say-it? meatiest snapping turtle he could find. When he did, they were butchered outside in the back yard. Since TV wouldn’t hit our small town until 1960 with an NBC antenna on the water tower, carrying a limited-distance signal, any event was cause for entertainment. Somehow word would go out that Mr. Hensel had a snapper, and we kids would gather to watch.

He had a butchering station all set up. There was a large post set in the ground, probably a 4x4. It was topped with a large wood board at his perfect working height. From the center of that board a large spike rose straight up. It was one of the biggest nails I had seen, and for a time I wondered how it came up from the middle of the post and through the board, but I eventually figured that out. The nail was sharp at the point, and he always started by slamming the turtle belly-up onto the nail, impaling and immobilizing it. Nasty as snappers are, it also kept him safe during the butchering process. We would come to learn how important that was.

I would learn to be impressed by how sharp his knives were, and how tough the skin on a snapper was. At the time, we just took it all for granted. First he removed the shell protecting the belly. Then he carefully scooped out the inedible parts. All this time the legs and head were moving, and we wondered aloud that he hadn’t killed the turtle. He insisted that in fact he had, that the nail spike directly through the spine had killed it instantly. But just like chickens flopped around after their heads were cut off ( we had all seen this), the turtle’s nerves kept it moving long after it was dead. As a way of demonstrating this, he cut out the turtle’s heart and gave it to us. It was still beating, but the turtle was now demonstrably dead - it had to be - though pieces were still moving. We became believers. When I got one heart, I took it home and set it in a bowl of salty water, as instructed. It kept beating until the next day! Of course the bowl, salt and water were to be found in our kitchen, so that’s where I left the heart when I got bored watching it. Mom was not thrilled.

Another thing he removed, when the turtle was female, was eggs. Chances are the turtle was caught trying to cross the road to lay them. They were lifted out in a long string-like tube, like an intestine, but filled with single-file eggs, moist soft shells, perfectly round to the eye, slightly cream colored, and just over an inch in diameter. At least one year my brother Steve took a batch home and “planted” them, digging them a sandy hole and covering them over again, to wait the 100 days it would take for them to hatch. In order to keep raccoons and other predators away from the eggs, he put them in the ground under the fenced cage of the pigeon coop. His pigeon coop, actually, where he raised and trained homing pigeons. Being older and a boy, he got to do cool things like that. I got to watch.

I did manage to let myself into the coop a few weeks later without letting any of the pigeons out, and very carefully dug up one of the eggs to look at. The shell was now dry and leathery, and when I held it up to the sun, something like candling eggs to see if they’d been fertilized, there was a dark blob inside. We were gonna have turtles! I carefully reburied the egg and smoothed the dirt back over like I’d never been there at all, grateful at not having been caught. Sure enough, something like 100 days after they were buried, little snappers began to appear in the yard. They were small enough to crawl through the openings in the fencing as they frantically tried to find water. Being black, they were easy enough to find in the well-mown grass, so we gathered up the ones that had escaped, and then Steve carefully unearthed the rest of the baby turtles that were hatching and struggling to the surface so that he’d have all of them. Many still had shriveled yolk sacs attached, so I got an appreciation of a yolk’s true function. (Somehow I’d had the idea that it was the yolk that developed into the animal It was, after all, the most interesting part of the egg) The river was only a few blocks away, so they were transported there to fend for themselves. Their shells were about the size of a quarter and they were absolutely adorable! Well, except for the thing about them being ugly snapping turtles. Even then you had to be careful to avoid their mouths.

As I said earlier, being a boy meant my brother got to do all kinds of cool things, not just raising homing pigeons. He had a flying squirrel in a large outdoor cage, which I tried to feed once, but it climbed on my hand, sniffed the nut, and bit my hand! Steve collected and mounted insects after killing them in a jar with carbon tetrachloride, still available back then for home dry-cleaning. I guess the fact that it quickly killed insects didn’t carry over to the idea of any danger to kids. He also had a bike. At the very old age of 12, I not only didn’t have one, but worse, I had no clue how to ride one.

A family trip to visit relatives in Minneapolis started to correct that lack in my education. Neighborhood kids let me try to ride one of theirs, and after some instruction and one of them holding the back up while I started, I managed to complete a terrifying ride all the way around the block to my starting place. Terrifying, yes, but exhilarating as well. When I got back home I told Charlene about it, and she let me use her bike out in the street in front of her house. Cars were rare, and sidewalks nonexistent, so it was safe enough, or so we thought.

We didn’t count on her cousins, living in the house of the other end of her block. They watched me wobble by, and after I turned around- a triumph in itself - and was coming back, they were ready for me, charging out into the street with a big stick. To them it was a great lark to shove it into the spokes of the front wheel. To me, not so much. The bike stopped immediately, of course. I didn’t. I’m not sure what I hit on my way down, but it cut completely through my lower lip and into the flesh under my front teeth. I bled all the way home, ruining whatever I had been wearing. Mom blamed me, of course. Surely I had teased those nasty boys and “made” them do that? No, I hadn’t. It made no difference. So nothing was ever said by my parents to theirs. However, at some point Charlene had to explain to her parents how it happened that her bike wheel was ruined, and the boys did get some kind of punishment from their parents. Whatever it was, I wasn’t a witness to it, so for me it may as well have not happened. The bike wheel was replaced. I still have the scar under my lip.

Some time shortly after the bike incident, we all were over in Charlene's yard watching another snapper get butchered. After the head was removed, one of the boys took a stick and inserted it in the turtle’s mouth, where it clamped shut over the stick. After waving it around like a flag to test the jaw's grip strength, he swung it up in the air and the turtle’s head flew up, up, and then down, down, right onto the kid’s finger, held up while he tried to catch the head. Instead, the head caught him. CLAMP! Hard!

He was, of course, yelling and crying,”Get it off! Get it off!” That took a while. And we, of course, were laughing uncontrollably at the sheer impossibility of it all. Well, that, and the fact for me, at least, that it couldn’t have happened to a better kid! Here, at long last, before my very eyes, justice was served!

Eventually, long after we kids had lost interest in the process, meat was obtained from the carcass and taken inside where soup was prepared. When I asked Charlene what snapping turtle soup tasted like, she informed me it was delicious. She at least had the sense not to insist it tasted like chicken, but did invite me over for a meal of it with the family. Mom wouldn’t let me. I don’t know if it was so that I wouldn’t be an imposition on the family, or so that the “Catholic” wouldn’t somehow rub off on me. Perhaps both.



II: The 70’s

Our family moved to St. Paul in 1964, and by the ‘70s I was married, living in the suburbs, and starting my own family. One day I was driving down some road when I spied a large snapping turtle on the road. I figured, “why not?” and got out to start my own batch of snapping turtle soup. Grabbing it by the tail was tricky. It always seemed to be able to turn around to face me faster than I could reach the tail, tentative as I was. Eventually stubbornness prevailed - the story of this whole sorry episode - and I loaded it in the back of my vehicle. I figured the seats would at least keep me protected from the turtle while I drove it home, and in this, at least, I was correct. Getting it out proved to be another logistical puzzle.

I had none of the right equipment. My experience in butchering rabbits didn’t quite provide the right skills either: rabbits were easy to kill and easy to skin. No butchering board was set up with a spike nail set in it in my back yard. A sharp knife in my kitchen would have been a miracle. And I had only a child’s memories and my stubbornness to guide me through the process. I had started, and I was going to finish.

I have absolutely no idea now just how I did it, but eventually there was soup in everybody's bowl on the table. I kept remembering how Charlene had assured me it was delicious. It only took one taste to convince anyone who didn’t know it already that this had been a disaster of an idea. The meat as I prepared it was tougher than a retired whore, and the flavor was nauseatingly fishy and muddy. Either Charlene’s mother had amazing culinary skills, or it was the fear of God that made that turtle soup tasted delicious to Charlene all those years ago. Perhaps both.