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Terrapin Soup
1 quart chicken or white-stock; 1 pint terrapin meat; 1 cup cream; 2 hard-boiled egg-yolks; 2 tablespoonfuls butter; 1 tablespoonful rice flour; 1/2 teaspoonful salt; 1/2 saltspoonful paprika; a blade of mace; 1/2 glass madeira or sherry.
Simmer the terrapin meat for half an hour in the stock, adding the salt, mace, and paprika. Mash the egg-yolks smooth, and add with the hot cream. Rub together the rice flour and butter until smooth, mix with a little of the hot liquor, then stir it into the soup; let it boil a few minutes and add the wine.
Serve with dry plain boiled rice or rice-or egg-balls.
This is a late-nineteenth-century club-and-hotel soup built on an animal that can no longer legally or ethically be put in a pot in most of the United States. The technique is unremarkable; the main ingredient is the problem.
- The terrapin itselfThe "terrapin" of American cookery is the diamondback, Malaclemys terrapin, a brackish-marsh turtle that was hunted to commercial collapse by the early twentieth century. Harvest is now prohibited or tightly restricted in nearly every state within its range, and the species is listed on CITES Appendix II. There is effectively no lawful retail source for a pint of terrapin meat.
- Other turtle is not a substituteSnapping turtle and imported farmed softshell are sometimes offered as stand-ins, but wild freshwater turtles are long-lived predators that accumulate mercury in their tissue and organochlorines in their fat, and several are themselves state-protected. If you want a soup of this shape, use a current recipe written for an ingredient you can buy.
- Rice flour and butterThe beurre manié here is made with rice flour rather than wheat. Rice flour was among the thickeners favoured for delicate cream soups of this era, valued for staying clear and not tasting raw.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the paprika here amounts to about an eighth of a teaspoon — a tint of colour and warmth, not seasoning in the modern sense.
- "Half a glass" of wineThe measure is genuinely loose. A wine glass in period cookbooks is usually reckoned at two fluid ounces, making this about one ounce, but nineteenth-century terrapin service was notoriously generous with madeira and some kitchens meant a good deal more.
- A blade of maceOne flat shard of the dried aril around a nutmeg, roughly a quarter teaspoon's worth of ground mace. The recipe does not say so, but such a blade would normally be lifted out before serving.
- Egg-ballsThe accompanying garnish is hard-boiled yolks pounded with raw yolk and a little flour, rolled small and poached — a standard Victorian finish for turtle and mock-turtle soups, and the tell that this recipe descends from that tradition.