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Mock Terrapin Soup
Cut up two pounds roast or boiled beef in small pieces. Put one large teacup new milk, one large teacup of wine, a piece of butter size of an egg (rolled in flour), a little nutmeg, two or three spoonfuls mixed mustard--all in a stewpan, and cook ten or fifteen minutes. Good way to use up cold meats.-Mrs.
A frugal Reconstruction-era dish that dresses cold beef in the seasonings of an expensive terrapin stew. It is really a rich mustard-wine gravy, and the technique that matters is keeping it below a boil.
- Do not let it boilWine and mustard acid in hot milk can curdle if the pan reaches a rolling simmer. The recipe puts everything in the stewpan together for ten to fifteen minutes; keep the heat low enough that the sauce never more than trembles.
- A large teacupPeriod teacups are usually reckoned at roughly 4 to 6 fl oz, so a "large" one is somewhere near a cup. About 1 cup milk and 1 cup wine is a reasonable reading, or less wine if you want the mustard forward rather than the alcohol.
- New milkFresh, unskimmed whole milk straight from the cow. Whole milk is the substitute; a splash of cream will bring it nearer the original's body.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. "Rolled in flour" means working the butter in flour so it carries a coating into the pan; that flour is what thickens the sauce. The recipe gives no quantity for it.
- Mixed mustardPrepared wet mustard, not the dry powder. Two or three spoonfuls of a sharp English or Dijon-style prepared mustard is a lot; start with two and taste, since the strength of period prepared mustards varied a good deal.
- The wineSherry or Madeira is the likely intention in a Virginia kitchen of this date, and either suits the dish. A dry white will taste thin and sour against the mustard.
- The meatCold roast or boiled beef, cut small. The recipe appears to cook it in the sauce for the full ten to fifteen minutes; since it is already cooked, adding it nearer the end will keep it from turning stringy.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of meat in this quantity of sauce feeds four to six. Serve it over toast, rice or hot boiled potatoes, the way a real terrapin stew would have gone to table.
Diamondback terrapin soup was one of the great luxury dishes of the Chesapeake in the nineteenth century, thick with the turtle's own meat and eggs and finished with Madeira, butter, cream and egg yolks. It was expensive enough that cooks up and down the coast produced "mock" versions, and what makes them recognizable is not the meat but the seasoning: the wine, the nutmeg, the butter rolled in flour, and above all the mustard, which is characteristic of the imitations rather than the original. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (variously cited as 1878 and 1879) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, which is why so many entries close with an attribution and, as here, a practical note on using up cold meats. The dish sits at the meeting point of two impulses in that book, aspiration to a fashionable table and strict thrift in a postwar economy. Wild terrapin, for its part, is now depleted and protected across much of its range, so the mock version has outlived the original in more ways than one.