Terrapin
First cut up the head and put it in the pot to boil with the shell on; when done enough to remove the under shell, take it up and pick to pieces. Clean the top shell well; add a few crackers, onions, parsley, allspice, black pepper, butter, and wine.
Return it to the shell, put sliced lemon on and bake it.--Mrs. D.
This is a Chesapeake terrapin recipe of the sort that was standard in nineteenth-century Virginia households, and it cannot be carried out today. The reasons are legal as much as culinary.
- The animal is protectedThe diamondback terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin) that this recipe assumes was fished nearly to collapse by the early twentieth century. Maryland closed its commercial harvest outright in 2007, and Virginia and other Atlantic states now restrict or prohibit take. There is no lawful supply for a home cook.
- Reptile pathogensTurtles and their shells are a well-documented reservoir of Salmonella. Cleaning a shell by hand and then filling it as a cooking vessel, as directed here, carries a contamination risk in the handling even though the shell goes into the oven with the meat.
- No temperature or time'when done enough to remove the under shell' and 'bake it' are the whole of the cooking guidance. There is no way to verify that the meat reaches a safe internal temperature, and nothing in the recipe would tell you if it had not.
- Undefined quantities'a few crackers, onions, parsley, allspice, black pepper, butter, and wine' gives no amounts and no size for the terrapin, so even the seasoning cannot be scaled from the text.
- If you want the flavourThe celebrated terrapin of hotel and club menus was a rich, sherry-laced stew of dark meat and butter; Mrs. D.'s is the plainer baked form. Either way, this page is worth reading, not cooking.
Terrapin was the great luxury of Chesapeake and tidewater Virginia cooking, and its presence in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) marks the height of that vogue rather than its beginning. Diamondback terrapins live in the brackish marshes of the bay, and they were cheap enough in the colonial period that they are often said to have been fed to laborers and enslaved people before fashion turned them into a dish for club dinners and hotel menus in Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. By the 1880s a good female terrapin could command a price that put it beside canvasback duck as a marker of an expensive table, and terrapin stewed with cream, butter, egg yolk and sherry became a fixed item of American formal dining. Mrs. D.'s version is the plainer domestic form, baking the picked meat back into the cleaned upper shell with crackers and wine, which is how the household cook handled an animal that came in whole rather than dressed. The demand outran the marshes: harvests collapsed in the early twentieth century, and the terrapin survives today as a harvest-regulated animal under state law and as Maryland's state reptile rather than a supper.