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Mock Terrapin in Fontage Cups
1 cup chickens' livers ½ cup cooked rice 2 hard-cooked eggs 1 teaspoon parsley chopped + teaspoon salt cayenne and nutmeg 1 tablespoon butter 2 tablespoons flour + cup cream Melt butter; add flour, seasonings, cream, livers, and eggs finely chopped; cook five minutes; add rice; reheat and serve in fontage cups.
A creamed chicken-liver mixture standing in for terrapin, served in small baked batter shells. The published text has lost several fraction marks, so a couple of quantities have to be reasoned out.
- The broken fractions"+ teaspoon salt" and "+ cup cream" are printer's or scanner's damage to fractions, most likely ½ in both cases. Half a cup of cream with 1 tablespoon butter and 2 tablespoons flour gives a very thick binding sauce, which is what you want for a filling that must sit in a pastry cup without running.
- Fontage cupsFontage (or timbale) cups are small crisp batter shells. Period sources describe them both as baked in special iron fontage-cup pans and, like timbale cases, as made by dipping a heated iron mold into a milk-and-egg batter and lowering it into deep fat until the cup slips off. Small baked tart shells or puff-pastry cases do the same job.
- Prepare the livers firstA cup of chicken livers is roughly 8 ounces. Trim any greenish gall-stained spots and connective tissue before chopping; a single bitter patch will carry through the whole cup of sauce.
- Five minutes is the pointThe recipe does not say whether the livers are raw or already cooked. If raw and finely chopped, five minutes in the simmering sauce should bring them through while keeping them tender; held longer they turn grainy and chalky. Confirm the mixture is hot throughout before it leaves the pan.
- Seasoning amountsCayenne and nutmeg are given without quantities. A scant pinch of each is in keeping with the period's use of nutmeg in cream sauces; nutmeg dominates quickly, so add it at the end and taste.
- The riceHalf a cup of cooked rice is stirred in only at the finish, to bulk the filling and mimic the soft texture of terrapin meat. Cooking it in the sauce would release starch and turn the whole thing pasty.
- YieldEnough to fill six to eight small cups, which serves four as an entrée in the older sense of a light course between fish and roast.
Diamondback terrapin was one of the great luxuries of American cooking from the mid-nineteenth century into the early twentieth, and Maryland-style terrapin stew — the meat with its liver and eggs bound in cream, butter and sherry — was the fashionable version. It was also expensive and, by the 1900s, increasingly scarce, since decades of harvesting had thinned the wild population. "Mock" dishes filled the gap: here chicken livers supply the rich, faintly mineral taste and hard-cooked egg yolk stands in for the terrapin's own eggs, both worked into the same thick cream sauce. The recipe appears in Lowney's Cook Book (1907), issued by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company and written by Maria Willett Howard, where it is served in a fontage cup — a showy but inexpensive presentation.