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Snapper Stew
Dice snapper, put into saucepan with barely enough water to cover, add 11/2 tablespoons butter, 1 teaspoon paprika, salt, and a dash of nutmeg. Cover pan and simmer until meat is tender; then stir in mashed yolks of 2 hard-cooked eggs mixed with 1 cup canned milk. Heat thoroughly, without boiling, and serve on toast.
A terrapin-style stew built on the old trick of thickening with hard-cooked egg yolk rather than flour. "Snapper" here means snapping turtle, not red snapper — the egg-yolk-and-cream finish is the signature of turtle and terrapin cookery, and the chapter's wild-food framing points the same way.
- No quantity is givenThe original never says how much meat to dice. The butter, egg and milk quantities suit roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb of picked meat, which serves three or four on toast. Scale the liquid to the meat rather than the reverse.
- Canned milkThis means unsweetened evaporated milk, not sweetened condensed. Evaporated is still sold and is the right choice; whole cream will also work, but condensed milk will make the stew sweet.
- The hinge: never let it boilEgg yolk is the only thickener here, and the recipe itself says to heat thoroughly without boiling. Once the yolk-and-milk mixture goes in, hold the pan below a simmer; a hard boil can separate the milk and leave the stew grainy rather than velvety.
- "Simmer until tender" is a long timeIf, as the egg-yolk finish suggests, this is snapping turtle rather than fish, the meat is worked muscle: diced leg and neck meat is generally given an hour or more at a bare simmer, topped up with water as needed, before it gives way. A few minutes will leave it rubbery.
- Getting the meatTurtle is not a supermarket item. Farmed snapping turtle meat is sold frozen by some game dealers; wild-caught turtle is regulated by season and size limit in most jurisdictions, and larger old snappers accumulate mercury and PCBs, so they are a poor choice for frequent eating.
- Hard-cooked yolksCook the eggs through, cool them, then press the yolks through a sieve and slake them with a little of the warm milk before adding. Mashing them straight into the pan leaves yellow specks that will not disperse.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of paprika in a stew this size is for colour more than heat. Use sweet Hungarian paprika; smoked paprika will dominate the delicate meat.
- ServingPlain buttered toast points, cut on the diagonal, and the stew ladled over at the moment it comes off the heat — it stiffens as it cools.
Turtle stew thickened with hard-cooked egg yolks descends directly from the terrapin dishes that were the height of American luxury dining from the 1850s through the early 1900s, when diamondback terrapin from the Chesapeake commanded prices that eventually helped collapse the population. The snapping turtle was the everyman's substitute: abundant in farm ponds and slow rivers across the eastern United States, free to anyone willing to catch and dress one, and coarse enough in flavour to want the butter, paprika and nutmeg this version supplies.