Beef Terrapin
Shin of beef Salt and red pepper 3 blades mace 2 tablespoons currant jelly 1/4 pound butter 1 cup cream 1 heaping teaspoon flour Have the shin of beef sawed through the bone in three places; put it in a vessel over the fire; cover with boiling water and throw in a tablespoon of salt. Boil slowly until tender (three or four hours), adding more water if necessary. When the meat is done, remove and cool it, saving the broth for soup. Cut the cold meat into half-inch dice; add seasoning and butter and the flour well mixed with the cream. Bring to a boil, stir in the jelly and serve.
A mock terrapin: cold boiled beef shank in a buttery cream sauce sharpened with currant jelly, imitating the fashionable turtle stews of the period. Two things carry it — the long slow simmer of the shank, and not letting the finished cream sauce break.
- Shin of beefThis is the beef shank, sold today crosscut as osso buco or whole as a soup bone. No weight is given; a bone-in shank of a few pounds will yield considerably less picked meat once the bone and gristle are out.
- Sawed through in three placesAsk the butcher to cut it, or buy it already crosscut into thick rounds. The recipe does not say why; cutting through the bone makes the shank fit the vessel and opens the marrow to the broth.
- The simmer, not a boil"Boil slowly" means a bare simmer with the surface just trembling. A hard boil for three hours tightens the shank's connective tissue and squeezes the meat dry before the collagen has a chance to melt.
- Blades of maceMace is the dried casing around the nutmeg seed; a blade is one whole dried piece. Three blades is a light hand, perhaps a quarter to half a teaspoon of ground mace if that is what you have. The method never says when the mace goes in.
- The flour and creamA heaping teaspoon of flour to a cup of cream gives a barely-thickened sauce, so whisk the flour into the cold cream until smooth before it meets the hot pan. Bring it just to a boil and no further, or the cream will separate around the diced meat.
- Currant jelly lastThe recipe brings the sauce to a boil and then stirs the jelly in at the end. Its acidity is what keeps a butter-and-cream sauce from tasting merely rich, so let it melt in rather than cooking it down.
- ButterA quarter pound is one stick, 4 oz. With modern palates you can cut this by half without the dish falling apart.
- Serving and yieldServes four to six. Terrapin dishes of this era went onto buttered toast points or into pastry shells, with the reserved broth kept back for soup as instructed.
Diamondback terrapin stew was one of the great luxury dishes of nineteenth-century American dining, associated above all with Baltimore and Philadelphia, and served in a cream-and-butter sauce seasoned with mace and lifted with a spoonful of currant jelly or a glass of sherry. Demand was heavy enough that wild terrapin populations collapsed, and the species is protected or restricted in much of its range today. "Beef terrapin" is one of a whole family of mock versions — mock terrapin, mock turtle, veal terrapin — that kept the sauce and dropped the expensive animal. The currant jelly is suggestive rather than conclusive: it was in wide use with beef and game as well, but in this company it hints at what the dish is imitating.