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Terrapin à la Maryland
Add to Terrapin à la Baltimore one tablespoon each butter and flour creamed together, one-half cup cream, yolks two eggs slightly beaten, and one teaspoon lemon juice; then add, just before serving, one tablespoon Sherry wine. Pour in a deep dish and garnish with toast or puff-paste points.
This is not a standalone recipe but an enrichment of the book's Terrapin à la Baltimore, and the whole thing rests on an animal that can no longer lawfully be bought or taken in most of its range.
- The animal is the problemThe terrapin meant here is the diamondback terrapin, Malaclemys terrapin, of the Atlantic and Gulf brackish marshes. Maryland closed its commercial terrapin fishery in 2007, other states along the coast restrict or prohibit take, and the species was added to CITES Appendix II in 2013. There is no legal commercial supply of the kind this recipe assumes.
- Substituting another turtle does not fix itSnapping turtle, the usual stand-in, is itself regulated in many states and carries state health advisories for mercury and PCBs, since long-lived freshwater turtles concentrate contaminants in fat and liver. Wild-caught turtle is also a recognised source of Salmonella.
- It depends on a recipe you do not haveEverything here is added to a finished Terrapin à la Baltimore, which supplies the dressed meat, the liver and eggs, and the seasoning. Read on its own the page gives no quantity of meat, no cooking time and no yield.
- The egg yolksThe two yolks act as a liaison rather than a cooked custard, and the page gives no heating instruction for them, so there is no assurance they reach a pasteurising temperature. That matters less than the terrapin, but is worth knowing.
- If you want the sauceThe butter-and-flour beurre manié, cream, yolks, lemon and sherry are simply a rich enriched cream sauce and turn up in period lobster, sweetbread and chicken dishes. Use a current recipe for one of those rather than adapting this one.
- Sherry, then and nowThe tablespoon of sherry goes in just before serving rather than being cooked off, so its aroma survives to the dish. Period recipes of this sort generally assumed a drinkable dry to medium sherry, not the salted cooking sherry sold today.
Terrapin was, for roughly the century between the 1820s and Prohibition, among the most expensive things an American restaurant could put on a plate. Diamondback terrapins were pulled from Chesapeake and Delaware Bay marshes by the barrel, graded and priced by size, and stewed in cream and sherry at Delmonico's, at Baltimore club dinners, and at White House tables; a terrapin course signalled money in the way that caviar later would. Fannie Farmer gives it in the Boston school book, and the two versions here — Baltimore plain, Maryland enriched with egg and cream — reflect a period difference of opinion over whether the meat should be dressed simply or bound in a sauce, though the two labels are the book's own and should not be read as fixed regional styles. The dish ate itself out of existence: the fishery collapsed, Prohibition removed the sherry that defined it, and by the middle of the twentieth century terrapin had gone from luxury to conservation case. The recipe survives mainly as a record of what Gilded Age dining considered worth the trouble.