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Terrapin
The fresh-water tortoises called terrapin are considered a great delicacy in the United States, and they are occasionally imported into this country. The following is an approved method of cooking them. They must be killed like lobsters by being placed in boiling water. Skin them when killed, and cut off the claws; wash and put them on again to boil, with a teaspoonful of salt to every two terrapin. Remove the galls carefully; cut up the meat; season with pepper, mace, and nutmeg, and put in a stewpan with the juice of the meat; and, for each brace of terrapin, three ounces of butter and flour incorporated, a glass of sherry, and the beaten yolks of two eggs. The wine and eggs must be added after the whole is stewed perfectly tender.
This is a nineteenth-century luxury dish built around an animal that can no longer be taken or bought in most places, and the method carries risks the original author had no reason to think about.
- The animal itselfThe terrapin of American cookery is usually the diamondback, Malaclemys terrapin, a brackish-water turtle of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Commercial harvest is now prohibited or tightly restricted in most states within its range, and international trade is regulated under CITES; many other freshwater turtles are protected under state, federal or CITES rules as well. In practice most readers will have no lawful source for the main ingredient.
- Killing by immersion in boiling waterDropping a live reptile into boiling water is not a humane slaughter method by any current standard and is an offence under animal welfare law in the United Kingdom and much of Europe. The instruction to treat them "like lobsters" reflects an era with no legal or scientific framework for this at all.
- SalmonellaReptiles are a well-documented reservoir of Salmonella, carried asymptomatically in the gut and shed onto the shell and skin. Butchering a turtle in a domestic kitchen spreads that contamination across boards, sinks and hands, and the recipe's finish — raw yolks and wine stirred in at the end, with no further cooking specified — is exactly the stage where a cooked dish can be recontaminated.
- The gall"Remove the galls carefully" is the recipe's one real warning and it is given in four words. A ruptured gall bladder makes the meat inedibly bitter, and period terrapin recipes commonly dwell on its removal. The brevity here is a fair sign of how much unwritten knowledge the entry assumes.
- Wild-caught reptile fleshLong-lived aquatic reptiles from estuarine water accumulate mercury and other contaminants in muscle and fat. Even where a turtle can legally be taken, consumption advisories exist for precisely this reason.
- Reading it instead of cooking itThe recipe is worth having as a record of what a Victorian British cookery dictionary thought exotic and expensive. If you want the flavour of the style — flour-and-butter liaison, mace and nutmeg, sherry and egg yolk finished off the boil — that treatment belongs to a great many period stews of chicken, veal or rabbit, and a current recipe for one of those will get you there.
Terrapin stew was the high-water mark of nineteenth-century American luxury dining: a Chesapeake dish, associated above all with Maryland and Philadelphia, that travelled up to the great New York restaurants and from there into European cookbooks as a curiosity. Cassell's frames it exactly that way — a delicacy "in the United States" that is only "occasionally imported into this country" — and the treatment it records, with mace, nutmeg, sherry and an egg-yolk liaison, is close to what American sources of the same decades describe. The fashion had consequences. Diamondback terrapin were harvested heavily enough through the late 1800s that populations collapsed, and prices climbed to figures that put the dish beyond all but the wealthiest tables. Its disappearance is often attributed to Prohibition, on the grounds that a stew defined by a glass of sherry lost its point without it; the more durable reason is that the animal became scarce, and then protected. Today the diamondback is a conservation subject rather than a menu item, and this entry survives as evidence of the appetite that made that necessary.