My recollection of the Williamsburg episode as off in that it involved real turtle, not turtle soup! Thanks Oliver for leading me on this amusing quest, which will run in FINEST HOUR.....
A DISH FOR THE WORLD'S FIRST CITIZEN In selecting dinner menus for our conference at Williamsburg, Virginia in 1988, we learned that Churchill, for his visit in 1946, had requested not turtle soup but turtle itself—specifically Maryland Diamondback Terrapin. An archivist at Colonial Williamsburg unearthed a letter so extraordinary that our then executive director, Parker Lee, kept a copy, which he has now forwarded to me. It is necessary to edit from the following excerpt a word that is banned from civilized speech, but readers can probably guess. From: John N. Mackall, Vice-President Davison Chemical Corp., Baltimore Maryland To: John D. Green, General Manager Williamsburg Restoration Inc. 11 March 1946 (excerpt) Dear Mr. Green: Charlie Gillet called me to say that you were having a dinner for Mr. Churchill, and that he had expressed a desire to have Maryland Diamond Back Terrapin. He and I both agreed that the world’s first citizen should have the world’s first food if it was available, and that it could easily be made available. Perhaps you do not know too much of the Maryland Diamond Back Terrapin, but I will give you a thumbnail sketch. The same Diamond Back appears in the waters of North Carolina, George and Florida. The North Carolina Diamond Backs, called “sliders,” are only fit to feed to [expletive deleted], and the Georgia and Florida Diamond Backs are only fit to feed to pigs. The difference is in the food they eat. The Maryland Diamond Back, in its initial stages, lives exclusively on a diet of little soft shell crabs. They ought to be good…but commerce entered into it and began to raise them in captivity, and later from eggs, so that their exclusive diet was crab shells and dead crabs. Of course the worst Maryland Diamond Backs are better than the North Carolina or Georgia or Florida Diamond Backs, but they are still not first class. There are relatively few people in Maryland who, in the raw state, know the difference between a wild Diamond Back freshly caught, one fed in captivity, or one raised from eggs. Charlie Gillet and I know the difference, so when Mr. Churchill wanted terrapin we were confronted with finding wild Diamond Back that had never in their lives eaten anything but little soft shell crabs. We happen to know most of the people who have them, and it was a simple matter to have enough sent up for the purposes. I had heard that when Mr. Churchill visited Maryland for a couple of weeks [before WW2] when he was studying the battlefields of the Civil War, he had eaten Maryland Diamond Back Terrapin, and that he would be satisfied with none but the best. Indeed any man who can drink warm Vermouth before breakfast, as I hear Mr. Churchill does, ought to have something to compensate for it. Maryland Diamond Back seemed to be just what he needed, and it was a pleasure to get it for him and for you. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ChurchillChat" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/churchillchat?hl=en.
