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Stewed Terrapin, with Cream
Mix together in a saucepan, one small teacup of butter and one tablespoon of flour; put it on the fire and stir until it is well mixed and hot. Stir into this two teacupfuls of cream, one-fourth teaspoonful white pepper, half nutmeg grated, salt to taste, also a small quantity of cayenne. Then put in about a pint of the meat; stir until it is very hot. Then place the pan where it will keep the stew hot, but should not boil; stir into it the yolks of five eggs, well beaten; stir well, and pour the stew into a tureen at once (as the terrapin should not boil after adding the eggs) over a gill of good Madeira and a spoonful of lemon juice. Serve while hot. Season with salt and pepper.
This is a nineteenth-century luxury dish built on an ingredient that is no longer legally or ethically available. The notes below are for reading the recipe, not for cooking it.
- The terrapin itselfThe "meat" here is diamondback terrapin, Malaclemys terrapin, taken from Atlantic and Gulf salt marshes. Heavy market hunting for dishes of this kind is generally blamed for the collapse of the wild stocks; the species is now listed on CITES Appendix II, and commercial harvest is prohibited or tightly restricted across most of its range. Any supply is at best narrowly regulated, and there is no wild source to take.
- Snapping turtle is not a swapCookbooks of the period sometimes substituted snapping turtle or "mock terrapin" made from calf's liver, but harvest of freshwater turtles is also regulated state by state, and wild turtle flesh carries a real burden of accumulated mercury and PCBs. Anyone drawn to the sauce should work from a current recipe for a different protein rather than adapt this one.
- The recipe assumes work already doneNothing here tells you how the terrapin was killed, parboiled, shelled and picked. That omitted stage — live handling, long boiling, separating liver and eggs from gall — is most of the original labour.
- Reading the measuresA teacup in this period is generally reckoned smaller than a modern cup; a gill is 4 fluid ounces. Either way the fat is high — a teacup of butter thickened with a single tablespoon of flour — and the liaison is the egg yolks, not the roux.
- The uncooked yolksFive yolks are stirred into a pan deliberately held below a simmer and served "at once." Held that way the mixture never reaches a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, which is why the same technique now calls for pasteurised eggs and a thermometer.
- Seasoning that reads oddlyHalf a whole nutmeg is a startling amount by current taste, and the salt and pepper are called for twice — once in the sauce, again at the end. The Madeira, cayenne and lemon belong to the same heavily seasoned scheme.
Terrapin stew was the high-water mark of American fashionable cookery between about 1840 and the First World War, and Maryland's Chesapeake terrapin was its most prized form; it appeared alongside canvasback duck on the menus of Delmonico's and of Washington official dinners, and cookbooks distinguished regional styles by whether cream, sherry or Madeira dominated. The version here, thickened with yolks and finished with Madeira off the heat, is the cream-and-wine school. Demand of that scale is the reason the dish has vanished: marsh populations were fished out, per-dozen prices climbed to figures that could exceed a labourer's weekly wage, and cooks were publishing "mock terrapin" made from veal or liver. Its presence in a general household book, among the fish and shellfish cookery, shows the dish at the moment it was still aspirational enough to print and just barely still obtainable.