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Terrapin Stew
2 terrapins. 1/2 lb. (1 cup) butter. 3 tablespoonfuls browned flour. 4 hard cooked yolks of eggs 3 tablespoonfuls browned 1/2 lb. (I cup) butter 1 tablespoonful salt 1 teaspoonful white pepper flour 1 pint (2 cups) cream 1 wineglassful sherry wine Encourage the terrapin to move about in lukewarm water for a few minutes, then plunge head first into a pan of boiling water.
Remove from the water in about five minutes, or as soon as the thin white skin can be removed from the head and feet, then put back into fresh boiling water and simmer for forty minutes, or until the upper
This is a period recipe for a dish that can no longer be made lawfully or humanely, and the text as printed is incomplete. It is reproduced here as a document, not as instructions to follow.
- The animal is protectedThe terrapin of American cookery is the diamondback, Malaclemys terrapin, whose populations were reduced sharply by demand of exactly this kind. It is listed on CITES Appendix II, and harvest for sale is prohibited or tightly restricted across most of its range, so there is effectively no ordinary commercial supply.
- Killing methodThe procedure directs the cook to scald a live animal. Killing an animal this way would fall foul of modern animal-cruelty statutes in most jurisdictions.
- Wild turtle and SalmonellaTurtles are a well-documented reservoir of Salmonella, carried in the gut and on the shell and skin. Handling and dressing a whole turtle in a domestic kitchen spreads it across surfaces long before anything reaches heat.
- Contaminant loadLong-lived aquatic reptiles from estuarine water accumulate mercury and organochlorines in fat and liver. Older cookbooks treat the liver and eggs as delicacies; they are the worst part of the animal in this respect.
- The text breaks offThe instructions stop mid-sentence at "until the upper" — presumably the upper shell loosens. Everything after the simmer, including the dressing of the meat, the removal of the gall bladder and the making of the cream-and-sherry sauce, is missing from this page. There is no complete method here to follow even in principle.
- Ingredient list is garbledThe column of quantities has been run together in setting: it should read four hard-cooked egg yolks, three tablespoonfuls of browned flour, half a pound (one cup) butter, one tablespoonful salt, one teaspoonful white pepper, one pint cream and one wineglassful of sherry. A wineglassful of the period is roughly two fluid ounces.
- If you want the sauceThe enriched sherry-and-cream sauce of terrapin stew is the part worth remembering, and it survives in current recipes for chicken, veal sweetbreads and crab. Use a modern recipe for those rather than adapting this one.
Terrapin was the great luxury of nineteenth-century American dining, and Maryland and Philadelphia cooks argued over its treatment with the vehemence usually reserved for politics. Diamondback terrapin from Chesapeake brackish marshes appeared on hotel and club menus alongside canvasback duck, dressed almost invariably in butter, cream, hard-cooked egg yolk and sherry — a sauce whose whole purpose was richness rather than the assertion of any flavour of its own. The demand did not last, because the supply did not: sustained commercial harvesting through the late 1800s and early 1900s reduced terrapin populations severely, and by mid-century the dish had effectively vanished from American tables, leaving the species under legal protection and the recipes behind as curiosities.