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To Cook Turtles
Drop four turtles into boiling water, and boil one hour; then take them out and remove the skin from the legs and feet, and replace them in fresh boiling water, where they should continue to boil one and one-half hour and then be taken out to cool. When cold, clean them thoroughly, removing the round liver which contains the gall. Cut them into small bits and place them in a stewpan, adding pepper, salt, the eggs that are found within, one quart water, one half pound butter, and two tablespoonfuls flour mixed with a little cold water. Stir the flour and water well into the other ingredients, and stew about twenty minutes. As you remove them from the fire, pour in one-half pint Madeira wine.--Mrs. A. D.
This is a terrapin recipe in all but name, and it belongs to a period when Chesapeake turtles were taken from the marsh by the bushel. The obstacles now are legal and biological rather than culinary.
- The species is the problemIn tidewater Virginia "turtles" in a cookbook of this date most probably means diamondback terrapin, Malaclemys terrapin, though the recipe never says so. Terrapin harvest is now prohibited or tightly restricted across much of its range, Virginia included, and a modern cook is unlikely to be able to take four of them lawfully.
- Sea turtle is entirely off the tableWhere a nineteenth-century book calls for green turtle, that animal is protected under the Endangered Species Act and CITES. Possession, purchase and import are criminal matters, not questions of technique.
- Wild freshwater turtles carry a real loadSnapping and slider turtles, sometimes substituted, concentrate mercury and PCBs in fat and liver, and several states issue consumption advisories against them. The long boiling here does nothing to those contaminants.
- Salmonella lives on the shell, not in the potTurtles are reservoir hosts for Salmonella, which is why the sale of small pet turtles was banned in the US in 1975. The risk in this recipe is in the handling, cleaning and cutting, not in the finished stew, which is cooked well past any doubt.
- "The eggs that are found within"The unlaid yolks were a prized part of a terrapin stew, and gravid females were sought partly for them. Harvest pressure of this kind contributed heavily to the collapse of wild populations, and the fishery is closed or restricted today.
- The round liver and the gallThe instruction to remove the gall is the one piece of craft in the original, and it is genuine: a ruptured gall bladder makes the whole dish inedibly bitter. It applies to any butchery, though it does not make this one advisable.
- If you want the flavourCook a modern published recipe for a farmed or legally sourced meat instead. The butter, flour, pepper and Madeira finish here is the Chesapeake terrapin sauce, and it transfers well to veal, rabbit or chicken thigh under contemporary instructions.
Terrapin stew was a great luxury dish of the Chesapeake and Philadelphia tables through the nineteenth century, and by the 1870s Maryland terrapin were shipped iced to northern city hotels at prices that put them alongside canvasback duck. The usual formula was fairly stable: the meat parboiled off the shell, the unlaid eggs saved whole, a butter-and-flour liaison, and a slug of Madeira stirred in off the heat, which is the sequence Mrs. A. D. gives here. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, records it as ordinary household cookery rather than restaurant fare. Demand of that scale did not last; terrapin populations were badly depleted by the early twentieth century, and the taste for the dish is often said to have faded further under Prohibition, when the Madeira and sherry that defined the sauce became awkward to obtain.