Home › Poultry and Game › Mock Terrapin
Mock Terrapin
1 1/2 cups cold cooked chicken or veal, cut in dice Whites 2 "hard-boiled" eggs, chopped 1 cup White Sauce I 3 tablespoons Sherry wine Yolks 2 "hard-boiled" eggs, finely chopped 1/4 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Add to sauce, chicken, yolks and whites of eggs, salt, and cayenne; cook two minutes, and add wine.
A chafing-dish dish built to imitate the sherried terrapin stews of the late nineteenth century, and it comes together in about five minutes once the sauce is made. Everything depends on the sauce being right and the wine going in last.
- White Sauce IThis refers back to the book's own sauce recipe. Use the version the book gives; if you are working from another source, a medium sauce of 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk gives the body this dish wants.
- The sherry goes in off the heatThe sherry goes in last -- The wine is added after the two minutes of cooking rather than with the other ingredients; taking the pan off the heat first is a reasonable reading, though the text does not say so. Wine stirred in at the end keeps more of its aroma.
- "Hard-boiled" in quotation marksThe quotes appear to be the author's own signal about how the eggs are cooked; follow the book's egg directions rather than a modern rolling boil.
- Keep yolks and whites separateThe recipe chops the yolks finely and the whites separately, so the yolks disperse through the sauce while the whites stay visible; chopping them together loses that contrast.
- Few grains cayenneRoughly a scant 1/16 teaspoon. It should register as warmth behind the sherry, not as heat.
- Two minutes means two minutesThe chicken or veal is already cooked. Longer heating in the sauce dries the dice out and dulls the egg yolk.
- Yield and servingThe book gives no yield; 1 1/2 cups of meat in 1 cup of sauce will serve two or three. Serve hot on toast points, in patty shells or from a chafing dish.
Terrapin "a la Maryland" was one of the great luxury dishes of American dining from the 1870s to the First World War: diamondback terrapin from the Chesapeake brackish marshes, stewed in cream or its own liquor with a great deal of sherry and enriched with mashed hard-boiled egg yolk. Demand at that level was unsustainable, and by the time this book was written terrapin was scarce and priced accordingly, which is exactly the gap a "mock" recipe fills. What is being imitated here is not the turtle's flavor so much as its signature texture and seasoning \the soft dice suspended in a pale sauce, the grit of chopped yolk, the sherry stirred in at the last moment — which is why diced chicken or veal can stand in convincingly. Mock dishes of this kind (mock turtle, mock duck, mock oyster) were a standard feature of American household cookery, offering the form of a fashionable restaurant dish at the price of leftovers.