Mock Terrapin
Cut lamb, mutton or chicken into small pieces, dredge with flour and season with pepper and salt, put into a small sauce pan, cover with water, add a piece of butter as large as you like, a few blades of mace, two or three cloves, two hard boiled eggs; stew all slowly for ten or fifteen minutes. Just before taking from the fire, add one glass sherry wine.
A late-Victorian imitation of a luxury dish, built to look and taste like stewed terrapin: pale meat in a buttery, mace-scented gravy studded with hard-boiled egg. The recipe assumes you already have cooked meat on hand.
- Start with cooked meatTen to fifteen minutes of slow stewing will not bring raw lamb or mutton to tenderness, so the recipe most likely assumes cold cooked meat, though it does not say so. The original asks only for "small pieces" and gives no size; the short stew is really there to marry the sauce.
- "A piece of butter as large as you like"For about a pound of meat, 2 to 3 tablespoons is in keeping with the dish. The butter and the dredging flour together are what make the gravy, so do not cut it to nothing.
- How much flourUnstated. Toss the meat in roughly 2 tablespoons before it goes in the pan, and add water only to cover — about a cup. Too much water gives a thin, floury broth rather than the thick sauce terrapin was prized for.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed, sold whole in "blades" or ground. Two or three blades, or about a quarter teaspoon ground, is right; it is the flavour that signals terrapin more than anything else here. Fish out whole spices before serving.
- The eggsTraditional terrapin used the yolks, mashed into the sauce as a thickener, with the whites diced. Sieving the two yolks in and chopping the whites gives a far better texture than dropping in whole halved eggs.
- "One glass sherry"A wine glass of the period is roughly 2 to 2.5 fluid ounces, not a modern tumbler. Use a dry or medium sherry, off the boil, so the alcohol softens but the aroma survives — that is why the original adds it last.
- Yield and servingAbout two to three suppers from a pound of meat. Serve in a shallow dish with toast points or hot buttered rolls, as the terrapin it imitates would have been.
Diamondback terrapin was one of the great American restaurant luxuries of the nineteenth century, taken from the Chesapeake and tidewater marshes and stewed with butter, cream or egg yolks, mace and a good deal of Madeira or sherry — "terrapin à la Maryland" appeared on expensive menus in Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. Because the live turtles were costly, seasonal and fiddly to dress, mock versions circulated widely in later nineteenth-century cookbooks, and this is one of the plainest: lamb or chicken standing in for the meat, with the mace, the hard-boiled egg and the glass of sherry carrying the whole illusion. Terrapin populations were badly overfished by the early twentieth century and the dish faded from menus, which makes recipes like this one a record of a taste rather than a substitute for it.