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Mock Terrapin
Have ready cooked half a calf's liver (it may be boiled or braised with vegetables). Cut it into small cubes. Put one-fourth a cup of butter into the blazer; when colored a little add the cubes of liver dredged with two tablespoonfuls of flour, onefourth a teaspoonful of paprica and half a teaspoonful of salt. Stir and cook until the flour is blended with the butter; then add one cup of water or stock and one teaspoonful of chopped parsley. As soon as the sauce boils, add one-fourth a cup of cream, two hard-boiled eggs chopped fine, and one teaspoonful of lemon juice. Serve on toast, with quarters of lemon cut lengthwise. Note.- Cream may be used in the place of stock, and the yolks of two uncooked eggs instead of the cooked eggs.
A chafing-dish imitation of terrapin stew, built on calf's liver and a quick roux sauce. It comes together in about ten minutes once the liver is cooked, so have everything cut and measured first.
- The blazerThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, set directly over the flame. Any heavy 9- or 10-inch skillet or sauté pan does the same work; only use the water-bath insert if you are holding the finished dish at table.
- Cook the liver first, gentlyHalf a calf's liver is roughly 1 1/2 lb, though it varies with the animal. Poach or braise it just until firm and barely pink at the center; liver that has been boiled hard turns grainy and no amount of sauce will hide it. Cube it after it has cooled enough to cut cleanly.
- The hinge: the cubes only reheatThe liver is already cooked. Its time in the blazer is to coat it in the butter and flour, not to cook it further. Stir the flour in for a minute or two, then get the liquid in and move on.
- PapricaA variant spelling of paprika found in cookbooks of the period. A sweet paprika is the safest reading here; smoked paprika will pull the dish somewhere else entirely.
- Dredged with flourToss the cubes in the two tablespoons of flour before they go in the pan, so the flour arrives on the meat rather than in a lump. The butter should be lightly browned first, which is what "colored a little" means.
- The raw-yolk variantThe note's substitution of two uncooked yolks for the chopped hard-boiled eggs enriches and thickens the sauce, as in some terrapin preparations. Add them off the heat, tempered with a little of the hot sauce, and understand that a sauce enriched this way is not brought back to a boil and so the yolks are not fully cooked.
- CreamUse heavy or whipping cream. Nineteenth-century "cream" was not standardized, but light cream or half-and-half may curdle if the sauce is boiled after it goes in.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities suggest roughly four servings on toast, or rather more as a small chafing-dish course. The lemon quarters are served with the dish rather than as garnish alone.
Real terrapin meant the diamondback turtle of the Chesapeake and the Atlantic coast marshes, stewed with butter, cream, sherry and its own eggs, and by the late nineteenth century it was among the most expensive things on an American menu, a fixture of club dinners and hotel banquets. That expense produced a whole genre of "mock terrapin" recipes, which reproduced the flavor and texture of the original with calf's liver, veal, or chicken and the characteristic egg-and-cream sauce with lemon. The chopped hard-boiled egg here is often taken to stand in for the terrapin eggs that were the prized part of the genuine dish. Its place in a chafing-dish chapter is telling: the chafing dish was the fashionable equipment of turn-of-the-century home entertaining, and books like this one taught hostesses to produce a restaurant-sounding course at the table without a kitchen staff. Diamondback terrapin populations collapsed under exactly this demand, and the turtle is now protected or regulated across much of its range, so the mock version is the only one most cooks will ever meet.