Next time find a stick dammit! One of my odest memories is of this guy named Phillip that was a teenager when I was just 5 or 6 years old. I was walking passed his house on my way home from school and he had caught a giant snapping turtle in a big turtle trap. It was an aluminum box the size of a large microwave. He and his friends had released the turtle in their yard and had surrounded it in a circle. They put a large stick in it's mouth and it had a strong grip of it. They pulled on the stick, elongating the neck and chopped it's head off right in front of me. I remember the eyes still moving in it's head and the body of the turtle still walked around for a bit with it's head chopped off. It was horrible. They made soup.
Fuck those dudes. I've had turtle before. Not the Western style turtle soup, but steamed and as a hotpot. It wasn't very good. I think that my love of turtles colored my experience, but all in all, I don't think the flavors were great. I really don't think people should eat turtles though. It takes too long for them to reach maturity and proper egg-laying size. Seeing something like that can really get to a kid. Were you ok after seeing that?
I tried turtle soup once when I was visiting the Cayman Islands, many years ago. It sounded like an interesting Caribbean delicacy, so I figured, when in Rome... The taste itself was fine, but I couldn't get rid of the mental imagery of what a turtle is, and what I was eating. My brain would replay an image of a turtle, complete in its shell, and then I'd focus on what was actually in the soup-- the meat of the turtle, which was the scrawny, reptilian flesh that was underneath that shell. I couldn't finish my bowl, and haven't had any desire for it since.
It's amazing how thinking too much about your food source can really inhibit it's enjoyment. Especially when eating meat. I'm curious though, what did it taste like? I would imagine that it's a bit fishy and somewhat earthy too?
It wasn't a pronounced taste, although to be fair this was probably around 20 years ago (good lord, really?) so I'm not sure how faithfully my memory serves. It was kind of a delicate texture and semi-overpowered by liberal amounts of jerk seasoning and some spices (cinnamon and nutmeg, if I recall). The first few bites went down well with a Red Stripe, but I kept envisioning the naked turtle sans shell and my stomach started to lurch a bit. I finished what I could so I wasn't too wasteful, but it was a fair amount of effort to keep it down after a while.
20 years is a long time to expect someone to remember the taste of soup they had. Thanks for trying :) The crazy thing is, the turtle that your soup was made of could still have been alive today. Snapper turtles can live up to 45 years. Pretty amazing.