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Chicken Terrapin
Make a sauce with two level tablespoons of butter, two of flour and one cup of cream, or half cream and chicken stock. Season with salt and pepper.
When boiling hot remove from the fire, add two well-beaten eggs and one pint of chopped cold chicken. Butter individual dishes or one baking dish, pour in the chicken mixture and place the dishes in a pan of hot water. Spread crumbs on the top and bake in a moderate oven for twenty minutes. Serve at once.
A baked chicken custard in white sauce, set in a water bath. The whole thing hinges on how you treat the eggs — the sauce must be off the heat before they go in, or you get scrambled egg in gravy rather than a smooth bound custard.
- Temper the eggsPull the pan from the heat, let it stop bubbling for a moment, then beat a few spoonfuls of the hot sauce into the eggs before returning the lot to the pan. The instruction to add them "when boiling hot" assumes a cook who works fast; tempering is safer and gives the same result.
- Moderate oven350F. At much above that the custard will curdle even in a water bath.
- The water bath is not optionalHot water halfway up the dishes keeps the egg below the point where it separates. Use hot, not boiling, water and check at 20 minutes — the center should be just set with a slight wobble.
- A pint of chopped chickenA dry measure here: about 2 cups packed, roughly 10 to 12 oz of cooked meat. That is the yield of one large breast plus a thigh, or the picked-over remains of a small roast bird.
- The sauceTwo tablespoons each butter and flour to one cup liquid is a medium white sauce. Cook the roux a minute before adding the cream so it does not taste of raw flour, and use the half-cream, half-stock version if you want the chicken flavor forward.
- CrumbsDry crumbs tossed in a little melted butter will brown; bare crumbs on a custard baked in a water bath tend to stay pale and dusty. The dish will not take on much color at 350F regardless — a brief run under the broiler at the end fixes that.
- YieldFour small ramekins, or one 1-quart baking dish. In a single dish, allow 25 to 30 minutes and test the center.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper only, as written, is thin by modern taste. A grating of nutmeg or a tablespoon of dry sherry stirred into the sauce brings it closer to the dish it is imitating.
"Terrapin" here is a method, not an animal. Diamondback terrapin stewed with cream, sherry and mashed hard-boiled egg yolk was one of the great luxury dishes of nineteenth-century American cooking, particularly in Baltimore and Philadelphia, and the combination of cream sauce, egg and diced meat became so identified with it that dishes built that way took the name. The pattern resembles the one that produced chicken a la king and the creamed-on-toast suppers: a bound cream sauce was one common way a household turned yesterday's roast into a dish worth putting on a table. This version is squarely in that tradition — cold chicken, a cup of sauce, individual dishes for the look of the thing. The fishery did not survive its own fashionability, and the diamondback terrapin is protected or managed across much of its range now, so the imitation has long outlasted what it imitated.