Stewed Terrapin
1/4 pound butter 1½ tablespoons flour 1/4 cup cream Yolk of 1 egg Salt and cayenne Pinch of mace 1 tablespoon currant jelly Rub the butter in the flour and add it to the terrapin; add the cream in which the egg has been beaten, salt, cayenne, mace and jelly. Simmer for ten minutes and serve.
This is only the finishing sauce for a dish whose main ingredient can no longer responsibly be bought or caught. The points below explain why the page is worth reading but not cooking.
- The terrapin itselfThe diamondback terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin) is the animal meant here, and it is the reason this recipe is closed to modern cooks. It is listed as vulnerable internationally, and commercial harvest and sale are prohibited or tightly restricted across most of its Atlantic and Gulf coast range.
- No substitution is impliedOther freshwater turtles are not a drop-in replacement: several are themselves protected, and wild-caught turtle carries a well-documented Salmonella risk. If you want the dish, use a current recipe built around a legal protein.
- The recipe is incomplete on its ownThe book assumes the terrapin has already been killed, boiled, and picked in a preceding entry. Nothing here tells you how the meat was cooked or to what temperature, which is a second reason the page cannot be followed as printed.
- What the method actually isButter rubbed into flour, cream slackened with an egg yolk, and a spoonful of currant jelly for sweetness and colour: a liaison-thickened cream sauce. The ten-minute simmer is for the flour, not the meat, and the yolk means it should not be allowed to boil or it may curdle.
- Quantities, for the recordA quarter pound of butter is one stick, 4 oz. The mace is the outer aril of nutmeg, warmer and more floral than the seed; cayenne and mace both appear frequently in period terrapin recipes.
- Where it belongsRead this as documentation of a vanished luxury course rather than as working instructions. Cream, egg yolk and cayenne over dark meat is a template that survives in other dishes.
Diamondback terrapin was a celebrated American delicacy in the nineteenth century, and Philadelphia and Baltimore each claimed the proper treatment of it, the versions differing chiefly in the use of cream and fortified wine. Cheap enough in the colonial period that it is often said to have been fed to labourers and enslaved workers along the Chesapeake, terrapin became a fashionable restaurant and club dish after the Civil War, and prices rose steeply as wild stocks were depleted in the early twentieth century. Its appearance in a Philadelphia cooking-school book is unsurprising, and instruction books of the era sometimes group terrapin with fish and shellfish. The fashion faded through a combination of scarcity, the failure of terrapin farming ventures, and, it is commonly said, Prohibition, which removed the fortified wine many versions of the sauce depended on.