Home › Baked Fish › Cayenne (Tablespoons butter Salt)
Cayenne (Tablespoons butter Salt)
1½ tablespoons butter Salt and pepper Yolks 2 eggs To stock and wine add terrapin meat, with bones cut in pieces and entrails cut in smaller pieces; then cook slowly until liquor is reduced one-half. Add liver separated in pieces, eggs, butter, salt, pepper, and cayenne.
This is the finishing stage of an old-style stewed terrapin, and it cannot be reproduced today: the animal at its centre is protected. The notes below explain what the instructions are asking for and why the dish belongs to the reading shelf rather than the stove.
- The animal is off limitsTerrapin here means the diamondback terrapin, Malaclemys terrapin. Its numbers have declined across its Atlantic and Gulf range; it is listed on CITES Appendix II, and most states in its range now prohibit or tightly license commercial harvest and sale. A cook is unlikely to find any lawful supply.
- Entrails and liverNineteenth-century terrapin cookery used the whole animal, viscera included, with the gall bladder carefully removed and discarded. Reptile offal carries a substantial Salmonella load, and the liver here is added only at the end of cooking, with no assurance it reaches a safe temperature.
- No quantities for the baseThe stock and wine are assumed from an earlier step and given no measure, so the reduction "one-half" has no starting volume attached. Nothing in the surviving text tells you how much liquid the seasoning was meant to balance.
- The egg yolks are a thickenerTwo yolks stirred in at the end act as a liaison rather than a cooked custard; the recipe gives no indication of the pan being taken off the heat. It is worth understanding as a method even where the dish itself is unmakeable.
- If you want the dish on the tableCooks who want something of the flavour profile — rich stock, wine, cayenne, a yolk-thickened finish — from farmed or ordinary meat should follow a current recipe rather than adapting this one.
Terrapin stew was a byword for American luxury dining from roughly the mid-nineteenth century to the First World War, served at Delmonico's and at Washington official dinners, and Baltimore cooks in particular claimed the definitive version. A recipe of this kind sat alongside canvasback duck and green turtle as a dish a well-run household was expected to know, and its price was part of the point. The wine-and-cayenne seasoning, the use of the liver, and the yolk thickening are consistent with period formulas. Demand of this kind is generally held to have stripped the Chesapeake and the eastern seaboard of terrapin within a few decades, which is why the recipe now reads as a document of a fishery that no longer exists.