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Terrapin (To prepare terrapin)
To prepare terrapin for cooking, plunge into boiling water and boil five minutes. Lift out of water with skimmer, and remove skin from feet and tail by rubbing with a towel. Draw out head with a skewer, and rub off skin.
To Cook Terrapin. Put in a kettle, cover with boiling salted water, add two slices each of carrot and onion, and a stalk of celery. Cook until meat is tender, which may be determined by pressing feet-meat between thumb and finger. The time required will be from thirty-five to forty minutes. Remove from water, cool, draw out nails from feet, cut under shell close to upper shell and remove. Empty upper shell and carefully remove and discard gall-bladder, sandbags, and thick, heavy part of intestines. Any of the gallbladder would give a bitter flavor to the dish. The liver, small intestines, and eggs are used with the meat.
This is a preparation method rather than a finished dish, and it cannot be carried out today. The animal it calls for is protected across its range.
- The species is off the tableThe terrapin of American cookery is the diamondback terrapin, Malaclemys terrapin, a brackish-water turtle of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Commercial harvest is prohibited or tightly restricted in the states where it occurs, and the species was listed on CITES Appendix II in 2013, which controls international trade. A home cook is unlikely to find a legal supply.
- The gall-bladder warning is the hingeThe original is right that any breach of the gall-bladder ruins the dish; the recipe says so itself, noting that any of the gall-bladder would give a bitter flavour.
- Live boilingThe method begins by plunging a live animal into boiling water. That is not an acceptable slaughter practice by any current standard of humane handling, quite apart from the legal question.
- VisceraThe recipe deliberately keeps the liver and small intestines. Reptile gut carries Salmonella as a normal resident flora, and the surfaces and tools involved contaminate readily.
- If you want the flavour of the eraLook instead to a current recipe for a cream-and-sherry stew of chicken or veal with hard-boiled egg yolk, which is what the so-called mock terrapin dishes of the same period were built to imitate.
Terrapin was one of the great luxury foods of nineteenth-century America, ranked with canvasback duck and green turtle soup on the menus of Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. Maryland cooking claimed it most loudly, and terrapin stewed with cream, butter, sherry and hard-boiled egg yolk was a fixture of club dinners and public banquets; it appears in The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book among the showpiece dishes a hostess might order for company. The word itself comes from an Algonquian term recorded by early English colonists, and the animal's abundance in Chesapeake marshes is what made it cheap enough, by tradition, to be fed to enslaved people and farm labourers in the eighteenth century before fashion drove the price to a reported fifty dollars a dozen and more. That fashion is precisely what destroyed the fishery. By the 1920s the wild population was reported to have collapsed, and the recipe survives now mainly as a record of how quickly a plentiful animal can be eaten into scarcity "cock terrapin" dishes that replaced it.