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Terrapin a la Baltimore
1 terrapin 3/4 cup White Stock 1 1/2 tablespoons wine Cayenne 1 1/2 tablespoons butter Salt and pepper Yolks 2 eggs To stock and wine add terrapin meat, with bones cut in pieces and entrails cut in smaller pieces; then cook slowly until liquor is reduced one-half. Add liver separated in pieces, eggs, butter, salt, pepper, and cayenne.
This is a finishing sauce for terrapin, not a whole method, and the animal at its centre is no longer an ordinary market item. The notes below explain what the text assumes and why the dish is closed to modern cooks.
- The animal is protectedThe terrapin meant here is the diamondback terrapin, Malaclemys terrapin, of Atlantic and Gulf salt marshes. Commercial harvest is now prohibited or tightly licensed across most of its range, and the species is listed on CITES Appendix II; taking or buying one is a legal matter before it is a cooking one.
- Wild turtle carries real riskFreshwater and brackish turtles are a well-documented reservoir of Salmonella, and the entrails and liver called for here are exactly the tissues where it concentrates. Coastal turtles also accumulate mercury and other contaminants in fat and organ meat.
- A whole step is missingThe recipe begins with dressed terrapin meat already off the shell. Period practice was to scald and boil the live animal, draw it, and remove the gall bladder and sand bag intact — a rupture of the gall taints the whole pot. None of that appears in the text, which assumes a cook who already knew it.
- White StockA cross-reference to the book's own recipe: veal or veal-and-fowl bones simmered with aromatics and no browning. Three-quarters of a cup is all that is wanted, so the finished sauce is very concentrated once reduced by half.
- The wineA tablespoon and a half is not decorative. Dry sherry or Madeira is the wine usually named in Maryland terrapin recipes of the period, and accounts also describe sherry passed separately at table in a small glass rather than cooked in at all.
- ScaleOne terrapin of the size once sold — a small animal by any modern standard, graded at market by shell length — yields very little meat. The dish was a small, rich course, not a main-course stew, which is why the sauce quantities look so slight.
- If you want the dishThere is no safe way to reproduce this with a wild terrapin. Cooks drawn to the style should look instead to a current recipe for a rich sherried stew built on a farmed or ordinary meat.