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Chicken Terrapin
Chop 1 cold roasted chicken fine. Put 3 tablespoonfuls of butter in a saucepan with 2 of flour, and when well blended add a cupful of cream. Cook until it thickens, then add the chopped chicken and a parboiled sweetbread. Season with salt and pepper and let it simmer slowly for fifteen minutes. When ready to serve, add the yolks of 2 hard-boiled eggs, mixed with 2 tablespoonfuls of milk, and 1 wineglassful of sherry. Garnish with hot boiled rice laid around the stew.
A cream-sauced chicken hash dressed to imitate the terrapin stews of the 1880s and 90s. Nothing here is difficult, but the proportions assume a few conventions that no longer hold.
- The nameThere is no turtle in this. "Terrapin" describes the treatment — diced meat in a cream or butter sauce finished with hard-boiled egg yolk and sherry — not the ingredient.
- WineglassfulIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. Add it off the heat or at a bare simmer so the sherry keeps its aroma; use a dry or medium-dry amontillado rather than cooking sherry.
- SweetbreadSweetbreads (veal are the usual choice) want soaking in several changes of cold water for a few hours, then a parboil of roughly ten to twenty minutes in acidulated water, then peeling of the membrane before they are diced. Order them ahead from a butcher. The dish works without one, though it loses its richness.
- The egg yolk finishSieve or mash the cooked yolks smooth with the milk before they go in, or they stay grainy. They enrich and lightly bind the sauce rather than sitting on top as a garnish.
- Cupful of creamThree tablespoons of butter to two of flour is a fat-heavy roux; a cup of cream on that base gives a thick sauce that will tighten further over fifteen minutes. Keep a little extra cream or milk to hand to loosen it before serving.
- ChickenOne cold roast bird yields roughly 3 cups of chopped meat. Leftover roast chicken is exactly what this was written for — cut it in small dice rather than shredding, since the texture is meant to read as terrapin.
- YieldServes four as a lunch or supper dish with the rice, six in smaller portions on toast or in pastry shells.