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Terrapin
Cut up the head and put on in a pot to boil with the shell on; when sufficiently done, remove the under shell, and pick to pieces. The top shell should be well cleaned; add some crackers, butter, onion, parsley, black pepper, allspice, and wine.
Put in the shell, and bake it.
This is a recipe to read rather than cook. Diamondback terrapin, the turtle these nineteenth-century recipes assume, is now protected or heavily restricted across most of its range, and the method itself is unworkable by modern standards.
- The speciesMalaclemys terrapin was harvested to near-collapse by the trade this recipe belonged to. It is now listed as a species of concern or given outright protected status in most Atlantic and Gulf coast states, with harvest banned in several. Taking, buying or serving one is a wildlife offence in much of its range.
- SalmonellaTurtles and terrapins are recognised reservoirs of Salmonella, which is why the sale of small pet turtles has been restricted in the United States since the 1970s. Wild-caught animals carry it in the gut and on the shell, and this recipe gives no temperature, no time and no guidance on handling the cleaned carapace it then uses as a baking dish.
- No temperature or time anywhere"when sufficiently done" and "bake it" are the only doneness cues given. There is nothing here a modern cook could follow safely even if the animal were legal.
- Unmeasured seasoningCrackers, butter, onion, parsley, black pepper, allspice and wine appear without a single quantity, which reads as a memory aid rather than a set of instructions.
- If you want the flavourA current recipe using farmed poultry, or a stew of dark meat in a Madeira-and-allspice sauce, will get you closer to the taste than anything you should attempt with a turtle.
Terrapin was among the most expensive things on an American table between roughly the 1880s and the First World War, and the diamondback of the Chesapeake was the prized variety hem them by size, and the very best were counted by the inch. Terrapin appeared at club dinners, in Delmonico's dining rooms and in society menus alongside canvasback duck, almost always finished with sherry or Madeira and cream. That prestige is exactly what emptied the marshes: commercial harvesting through the late nineteenth century drove the population so low that by the 1920s the fashion had collapsed for want of supply; Prohibition, which removed the wine the dish depended on, is often credited with hastening the decline. A household book of 1906 carrying three terrapin recipes is showing you a food at the tail end of its vogue e still aspirational, already growing scarce. The diamondback's fortunes since are a conservation matter rather than a culinary one, and the recipe survives now as evidence of how thoroughly appetite can strip a coastline.