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Chicken Terrapin
1 cup chicken broth 1 cup cream 1 chicken Salt and red pepper 2 blades mace ¼ pound butter 3 hard-boiled eggs tablespoon flour 2 tablespoons currant jelly Boil the chicken and giblets; when tender, cool thoroughly; cut into small pieces a half inch square. Put into a saucepan with the seasoning, chopped eggs and other ingredients, rubbing the flour in the butter first. Simmer for about ten minutes; add the jelly and serve. 1 chicken
A mock terrapin: boiled chicken cut small and finished in a rich egg-and-cream sauce standing in for the Maryland turtle stew it imitates. Two of the quantities are garbled by the original typesetting and need reading before you start.
- The garbled amounts"14 pound butter" is a broken fraction for 1/4 pound (8 tablespoons, or one stick), and "tablespoon flour" is 1 tablespoon. That ratio makes a very loose thickening on purpose; the sauce is meant to coat, not to set.
- Do not let it boilOnce the cream and the chopped egg are in, hold the pan at a bare tremble. Cream carrying that much butter and only a spoonful of flour will separate at a rolling boil, and the ten minutes of simmering is for warming through, not for reduction.
- The chickenA fowl of the period was an older bird, boiled an hour or more for the sake of the broth. A 3-4 lb chicken simmered until the leg meat pulls free, roughly 50-60 minutes, gives both the meat and the cup of broth the recipe calls for. Cool it fully before dicing or it shreds instead of cubing.
- Blades of maceMace blades are the dried aril of nutmeg, sold whole in some spice shops. Two blades steeped in the sauce and lifted out before serving is the intent; about 1/4 teaspoon of ground mace is the nearest substitute, and it stays in.
- Red pepperCayenne, and likely more of it than the phrase suggests. Terrapin recipes of this period often call for a pronounced cayenne heat against the sweetness of the jelly; start at 1/4 teaspoon and adjust.
- Currant jelly at the endAdd it off the direct heat and stir only until it dissolves. Its job is a sweet-tart edge that echoes the Madeira or sherry a true terrapin stew would have carried.
- GibletsBoiled with the bird and chopped in with the meat, as the recipe directs. The liver may add a faint offal richness, though the terrapin resemblance rests chiefly on the sauce.
- Yield and servingServes four to six as a course. Traditionally spooned over toast points, into pastry shells, or into a chafing dish for supper.
Diamondback terrapin was a genuine luxury on American tables from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1920s, so expensive and so identified with Baltimore and Philadelphia dining that cookbooks filled with substitutes: mock terrapin made of veal, of calf's liver, and, as here, of chicken. What all of them borrow is the sauce rather than the meat, since the signature of terrapin à la Maryland was hard-boiled egg yolk worked into butter and cream, sharpened with mace and cayenne and a spoonful of wine or currant jelly. Chicken terrapin let a household serve the flavor of a chophouse specialty at the price of a boiling fowl, which is exactly the sort of economy Mrs. Fryer's book was built to teach. The wild terrapin fishery collapsed under this demand; the species is protected or restricted across much of its range today, and the mock version has outlived the original.