What Ever Happened To Turtle Soup?

Jack Hitt explores the disappearance of an American delicacy and joins a hunting party to take part in a centuries-old culinary tradition.

- Jack Hitt

The best turtle hunting anywhere, I’d been told, was down this one road—“can’t miss it”—in that far southwest outback of Virginia where the state resembles a wood planer peeling Kentucky off from Tennessee. One of the few champions of the almost extinct practice is Ricky Crouch, a logger whose South Carolina twang is music to my ears (I’m from there, too). But his directions, translated through crummy cell reception, ended up on paper as: “Past a gas station, out of business, a road goes off there, left, right, the one-lane bridge, and careful there’s a rise where the road goes to gravel and it looks like you’re going to drive off the earth.” And finally, before he hung up: “Don’t worry, just get there and I’ll find you.”

Somehow I did find that terrifying rise, then down Dean Hollow Road, past the Dean Cemetery, where I met Buster Dean, who’s been hosting a turtle hunt at his farm for decades now. Crouch and assorted relatives and friends all gather here in this isolated little valley every July Fourth because they love the taste of snapping turtle and the intrigue of the hunt. They practice a style of turtle hunting that easily dates to before the Civil War and back to the very mists of the nation’s founding.