Terrapin Soup
1 can terrapin 4 cups white stock 4 tablespoons butter 2 egg yolks hard cooked salt, cayenne blade of mace 1 cup cream 2 tablespoons flour 1 cup sherry Cook terrapin, stock and mace twenty minutes. Melt butter, add flour, cream and egg yolks; combine mixtures, add sherry, and garnish with rice balls. 1 calf's head 1 teaspoon vinegar 2 tablespoons onion 2 tablespoons turnip bit of bay leaf 6 peppercorns 2 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 3 tablespoons Madeira 1/2 lemon, thinly sliced
A rich sherried cream soup from the era when canned terrapin sat on grocery shelves beside canned salmon. The ingredient at its center is no longer one a cook can lawfully or practically obtain, so the notes below are for reading rather than cooking.
- The terrapin itselfThe diamondback terrapin of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts was fished hard to supply exactly this kind of soup. Commercial harvest is now banned or tightly restricted through most states in its range, and canned terrapin has not been in the trade for generations. There is no practical legitimate source for the principal ingredient as the recipe intends it.
- If you want a soup like itUse a current recipe for a sherried cream bisque built on a poultry or shellfish base. We are not going to supply a substitution scheme for a protected species.
- White stockIn this period, white stock means unbrowned veal or chicken bones simmered with mild aromatics and no roasted color. Modern unsalted chicken stock is its nearest equivalent.
- Blade of maceA whole strip of the lacy aril around the nutmeg, not ground mace. It is fished out before serving; about a quarter teaspoon of ground mace carries similar weight but cannot be removed.
- The egg yolk liaisonHard-cooked yolks are worked smooth with the butter and flour to thicken and enrich rather than to bind. Because the yolks are already cooked the mixture is more forgiving than a raw-yolk liaison, but a soup carrying yolks and a cup of cream is still best held below a boil once the two pans are combined.
- A cup of sherryThat is a substantial pour for four cups of stock, and it goes in at the end without cooking off. The soup as written tastes strongly of wine, which was the point in 1907.
- Rice ballsThe garnish is small spheres of cooked rice, sometimes bound with egg. The recipe says only 'garnish with rice balls' and gives no method or manner of serving.
- YieldSix cups of liquid before the garnish, plus whatever the can contributes. The recipe states no number of servings.
Terrapin was the great luxury of nineteenth-century American dining, ranked with canvasback duck on Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York menus, and Maryland cooks in particular built a whole small cuisine around it in sherry and cream. The demand was ruinous: catches that are often said to have once been cheap enough to feed laborers were priced by the dozen at figures that made the diamondback worth chasing until the population gave way, and states began closing the fishery in the early twentieth century, though terrapin lingered on expensive menus into the 1930s. Lowney's, a chocolate company issuing a general cook book in 1907, could still assume a reader would find terrapin in a tin, which tells you how thoroughly the trade had industrialized a wild animal. The second half of this entry belongs to a different soup entirely, built on a calf's head in the mock turtle tradition, a dish devised to imitate green sea turtle soup and sharing this page by coincidence of typesetting.