Home › Menu IX › Chicken Terrapin
Chicken Terrapin
Mash Yolks of 3 hard-cooked eggs, add 5 tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon mustard 1 1/4 teaspoons salt 1/4 teaspoon white pepper and 3 tablespoons melted butter. Add to 2 cups scalded milk and cook until thick. Add Whites of 3 hard-cooked eggs, finely chopped 1 1/2 cups cooked chicken or fowl cut in cubes 1 or 2 tablespoons pimiento cut in strips 1 or 2 tablespoons green pepper cut in strips 2 tablespoons ripe olives cut in strips, and Juice of 1 lemon. Keep hot over hot water or electric grill and serve in patty shells reheated in the oven, or on toast. Serve with Spiced figs.
A creamed chicken thickened with hard-cooked egg yolk as well as flour, built to imitate the classic terrapin stew of the period. Two things decide whether it works: the sauce must be smooth before anything else goes in, and the lemon juice must go in last.
- Build the yolk paste properlySieve or press the yolks rather than crushing them with a fork, then work in the flour, mustard, seasoning and melted butter into a smooth paste. Any lumps at this stage will still be lumps in the finished sauce, since there is no long simmering to smooth them out.
- Lemon juice goes in at the end, off the heatLemon juice goes in at the end -- the recipe adds it with the chicken and the other garnishes. Acid can cause a hot milk sauce to break, though the flour here gives it some protection; stirring the juice in once the pan is off the direct heat is the safer course.
- Scalding the milkScalding was standard when milk was raw and when it shortened the cooking of a flour sauce. With pasteurized milk it is optional; heating the milk to just below a simmer before adding the paste still helps the sauce thicken evenly.
- "Cook until thick"Roughly 5 to 8 minutes of steady stirring over medium heat. Aim for a sauce that coats the back of a spoon heavily; it will loosen slightly once the chicken and lemon juice go in.
- Chicken or fowl"Fowl" meant a mature stewing hen, simmered until tender and far more flavorful than a young broiler. Meat pulled from a poached whole chicken or from thighs works; supermarket breast meat, cubed, is drier and blander than what the book assumed.
- Holding it hotThe double boiler or "electric grill," probably an electric hot plate or chafing-dish arrangement, is there because an egg-and-flour sauce scorches easily and the dish was meant to sit through a luncheon. Over direct heat it will catch on the bottom.
- Patty shellsFrozen puff pastry shells, baked and crisped (the recipe itself specifies no oven temperature), stand in. Fill them at the table rather than in advance or the pastry goes soggy.
- YieldAbout four servings as a luncheon dish, or six as one course among several. The spiced figs called for as an accompaniment are a sweet-sour pickled fig; a sharp fruit chutney or pickled peach does the same job of cutting the richness.
Terrapin — the diamondback turtle of the Chesapeake and other Atlantic estuaries — was one of the great luxury foods of nineteenth-century American dining, stewed in cream or Madeira and finished with the turtle's own eggs, which gave the sauce a distinctive crumbly richness. The wild populations were badly overfished and the price put the real thing out of reach of most households, so cookbooks offered "mock terrapin" and "chicken terrapin": creamed chicken in which sieved hard-cooked egg yolk mimics the terrapin eggs and chopped whites the flecks of meat. That is precisely what this recipe is doing, with the strips of pimiento, green pepper and ripe olive belonging to the vocabulary of American luncheon cookery. The chafing dish or electric plate for holding it hot marks it as a dish for a hostess serving guests without a cook standing by.