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Turtle or Terrapin Stew
After they are well cleaned, parboil the meat, then pick it to pieces. Season highly with pepper, salt, cayenne pepper, hardboiled egg, spices, lemon, and champagne or other wine. Stew until well done.
This is a recipe built on animals that can no longer legally be taken or bought in most of the United States, and it gives no quantities, no times and no temperatures for handling the meat. The points below explain the specific obstacles rather than offering a workaround.
- "Turtle" here means sea turtleIn nineteenth-century American cookery, unqualified "turtle" in a stew or soup meant green sea turtle, imported live from the Caribbean and Florida. All sea turtle species are listed under the Endangered Species Act and CITES Appendix I; possession, purchase and sale are prohibited, and there is no legal source.
- Diamondback terrapinThe terrapin of Chesapeake cookery is Malaclemys terrapin, whose populations collapsed under exactly the demand this book represents. Harvest is now banned outright in Maryland, Virginia and several other states, and tightly restricted elsewhere. Commercial sale for food is effectively closed.
- Wild turtle meat and contaminantsFreshwater turtles are long-lived bottom feeders that accumulate mercury, PCBs and organochlorine pesticides in fat and liver. State health advisories in several regions specifically warn against regular consumption of wild snapping turtle for this reason.
- Reptile meat and SalmonellaTurtles are a well-documented reservoir of Salmonella, which is why the sale of small pet turtles has been federally restricted since the 1970s. "Parboil" and "stew until well done" give a cook no internal temperature and no time, and the picking-to-pieces step between the two stages invites cross-contamination of the very equipment the meat returns to.
- No quantities at allThere is no weight of meat, no volume of liquid, no cooking time and no yield. Even setting the legal question aside, this reads as a reminder rather than a recipe — assuming a cook who already knew how to dress and handle the animal and needed only the seasoning list.
- If you want the flavourUse a current, properly specified recipe for a legally sourced meat. Do not adapt this one.
Terrapin stew was the great luxury dish of the Chesapeake, and its presence in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) marks the height of a fashion that ran from roughly the 1820s to the First World War. Baltimore and Philadelphia restaurants built their reputations on it, the terrapin was graded and priced by the length of its shell, and the near-obligatory splash of champagne or Madeira at the end signalled that this was company food. The seasoning list — cayenne, hard-boiled egg, lemon, wine — is the standard Chesapeake formula, repeated with small variations across dozens of nineteenth-century books. Demand of this kind is generally credited with driving the diamondback terrapin toward commercial extinction by the 1920s; the crash in supply, rather than any change in taste, is usually said to be what finally took the dish off American menus. Green sea turtle followed the same arc a few decades later, and the canned mock turtle soup made from calf's head that survived into the twentieth century is the fossil of that trade.