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Lamb Terrapin
Mix two cups cold cooked lamb, cut in small pieces, two hard-cooked eggs, chopped fine, two tablespoons olive oil. Let stand two minutes. Melt two tablespoons butter; add two tablespoons flour, one teaspoon mustard, one teaspoon Worcestershire sauce, and one cup lamb stock, or milk. Cook five minutes. Add lamb and eggs and serve on graham toast.
Sautéd Oysters Season four dozen large oysters with salt, pepper, onion juice and lemon juice. Dip in crumbs, egg and crumbs, and sauté in butter.
A chafing-dish supper dish built on leftover roast lamb, thickened with a mustard-sharpened velouté in the manner of the terrapin stews of the period. Nothing here is difficult, but a few of the terms and proportions need translating.
- "Terrapin" means the sauce, not the turtleThe name signals a style: diced meat and chopped hard-cooked egg bound in a rich cream or velouté, in imitation of the terrapin stews served in hotel dining rooms, though the mustard and Worcestershire here belong more to the mock versions than to the original. No turtle is involved and none should be sought.
- The hinge: don't let the sauce break the eggs downAdd the lamb and eggs off the heat or at the barest simmer and stir only enough to coat. Boiling the mixture turns the egg yolk grainy and pushes the lamb from tender to stringy, which is the usual failure of reheated cooked meat.
- The two-minute oil soakThe olive oil poured over the lamb and eggs appears to be a brief marinade for the dry, already-cooked meat. The recipe specifies two minutes and offers no other guidance.
- Mustard means dry mustardA teaspoon of mustard in a 1900s American book is most likely powdered English-style mustard, whisked into the roux. Prepared mustard is a good deal milder spoon for spoon and will not carry the dish in the same way.
- The sauce is deliberately thickTwo tablespoons each butter and flour to one cup of liquid gives a heavy binding sauce, not a pouring one. Cook the roux a minute before the liquid goes in, then the five minutes specified, to lose the raw flour taste.
- Lamb stock or milkStock gives the better result; if using milk, add a pinch of salt, since the recipe assumes seasoned stock and calls for no salt at all.
- Graham toastGraham flour is coarse whole-wheat flour with the bran retained. Any sturdy whole-wheat bread, toasted dry and firm, stands in; the point is a slice that will not collapse under a wet sauce.
- YieldTwo cups of meat in a cup of sauce serves four as a light supper or lunch, two if it is the whole meal.
- The oyster recipe tacked on the endFour dozen large oysters is a party quantity, eight to twelve servings. Breaded oysters need only two to three minutes total in hot butter, turned once, until the crumbs colour; held longer they shrink and toughen. Drain the oysters well before crumbing or the coating slides off.
Terrapin was one of the prestige dishes of nineteenth-century American cookery, particularly in Baltimore and Philadelphia, where diamondback terrapin stewed with cream, egg yolk, butter and sherry appeared on club and hotel menus at prices that put it out of ordinary reach. Demand of that kind emptied the marshes, and by the early 1900s the creature was scarce and dear. Cooks responded the way cooks always do, by keeping the sauce and changing the protein: "mock terrapin" and "lamb terrapin" and "veal terrapin" recipes multiplied, all of them recognisable by the chopped hard-cooked egg standing in for the turtle's own eggs, and by the mustard and Worcestershire that had come to define the flavour. Its place here among the chafing-dish recipes is telling. The chafing dish was fashionable in American homes around 1900 for late suppers and informal entertaining, cooking done at the table without a servant, and it ran largely on cold cooked meat from an earlier meal dressed up in a hot sauce. That is the company this recipe keeps: a chocolate company's cook book turning yesterday's roast into something worth bringing to the table.