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Chicken Terrapin
1 1/2 cup dark meat 1 cup cream or stock 2 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon Gold Medal flour 3 egg yolks 1/2 teaspoon dried mustard 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup of Madeira Melt butter, add flour and seasoning, cook together; add a little at a time the cream or stock. Dilute the egg yolks with some of the sauce to thin, then add to the sauce. Cook the meat in this sauce for two minutes, add wine, reheat and serve. The dark meat of cold turkey or grouse may be used.
A small chafing-dish supper built on leftover dark meat, thickened with egg yolks rather than flour alone. The whole thing takes about ten minutes, and the only difficulty is keeping the sauce from curdling.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the yolks go in, hold the sauce below a simmer — roughly 160–175F. A boil will scramble the yolks and break the sauce, and reheating after the Madeira goes in is the moment it most often happens.
- Temper the yolks properly"Dilute the egg yolks with some of the sauce to thin" means whisk several spoonfuls of the hot sauce into the yolks first, then return the mixture to the pan off the heat. Adding yolks straight to the pan gives you sweet omelette.
- The meat is already cookedThis is a leftovers dish: cold roast chicken, turkey or grouse, cut in rough dice or short strips. The two minutes in the sauce is to heat it through, not to cook it — longer and the dark meat goes stringy.
- Dried mustardDry mustard powder, not prepared mustard from a jar. A half teaspoon in a cup of sauce is assertive but correct.
- Sauce consistencyOne tablespoon of flour to one cup of liquid is deliberately thin — the yolks provide most of the body. Expect something closer to a pourable custard than a gravy.
- MadeiraA dry or medium Madeira (Sercial or Verdelho) suits it; a sweet Malmsey will read as dessert. Dry sherry is the usual substitute. The wine goes in at the end so its aroma survives, which is also why it must not be boiled off.
- Yield and servingServes two generously, three at a pinch. Dishes of this kind were commonly sent out over buttered toast points or in puff-pastry patty shells; it needs a starch under it.
"Terrapin" here names a method, not an ingredient. Diamondback terrapin stewed in a rich sauce of cream, egg yolks, butter and Madeira was one of the most prized dishes of nineteenth-century American hotel and club cookery, particularly in Baltimore and Philadelphia, and as terrapin grew scarce and expensive the sauce was famous enough to survive on its own. Cooks applied it to other dark, close-textured meats — leftover turkey, chicken thighs, the legs of grouse — and still called the result terrapin. Its appearance in a flour company's promotional cookbook suggests the dish had migrated from the club dining room to the home table, where it made use of the remains of a roast bird.