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Turtle or Terrapin Steaks
Cut the turtle or terrapin in thin slices; broil or fry them with pepper, salt, and butter.
The technique here is nothing more than slicing and pan-cooking, but the animal at the center of it is the problem. Turtle and terrapin are no longer ordinary market goods, and in most cases obtaining them is either illegal or tightly restricted.
- Sea turtle is off the table entirelyAll sea turtle species are listed on CITES Appendix I, and the six that occur in U.S. waters are protected under the Endangered Species Act. Green turtle was the classic "turtle" of nineteenth-century soups and steaks; taking, buying, selling or possessing it now carries federal penalties.
- Diamondback terrapinThe Chesapeake terrapin this book assumes is now a species of conservation concern. Commercial harvest is banned in Maryland and restricted or prohibited across most of its range, with rules that differ state by state and change from year to year.
- Freshwater and snapping turtleSome species remain legally harvestable in some states under licence and season, but they are also among the wild foods most consistently flagged for mercury, PCB and organochlorine accumulation. Several state health departments issue explicit consumption advisories for snapping turtle.
- SalmonellaTurtles are a well-documented reservoir of Salmonella, which is why the sale of small pet turtles has been federally restricted in the U.S. since the 1970s. Thin steaks broiled with butter, as written, give no cooking temperature or time at all.
- The instruction that is missingThe original assumes a cook who has already killed, cleaned and dressed the animal — a substantial and specific job that the book covers nowhere on this page. Read as a standalone recipe, it begins in the middle.
- If you want the flavorConsult a current, regulated source and a current recipe. This one should be read rather than cooked.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and first published in 1878, gathering contributions from Virginia households, and it treats terrapin the way a modern book treats chicken — as something a cook simply had. The diamondback terrapin of the Chesapeake and the tidal Atlantic was abundant enough in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that it is often said to have been fed to enslaved people and indentured laborers as cheap protein; by the Gilded Age it had become one of the most expensive items on American restaurant menus, served in silver chafing dishes with Madeira. That reversal is precisely what emptied the marshes. Sustained commercial harvest for the luxury trade, combined with drowning in crab pots, drove the population down far enough that states began closing the fishery in the twentieth century. The brevity of this entry — one line, no seasoning beyond pepper, salt and butter — invites an interpretation: that the writer saw no need to say more about an animal she expected every reader to have on hand.