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Washington Terrapin
/ 1 terrapin 1½ tablespoons butter 1½ tablespoons flour 1 cup cream ½ cup chopped mushrooms
This entry is an ingredient list rather than a full method, and its principal ingredient can no longer legally or ethically be bought in most of the United States.
- The terrapin itselfThe animal meant here is the diamondback terrapin, Malaclemys terrapin, the brackish-marsh turtle of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Commercial harvest is now prohibited or tightly restricted across nearly its entire range, and the species has been listed on CITES Appendix II since 2013. There is no lawful supermarket substitute, and no equivalent that would make this the same dish.
- Why the ban existsThe Gilded Age appetite for terrapin stew is the textbook case of a food fashion eating a species down to remnant populations. Chesapeake landings collapsed in the early twentieth century and have never recovered; crab-pot drowning and road mortality now compound the historic overharvest.
- No instructions are givenThe book supplies quantities only. The full period method involved scalding and dressing the live animal, drawing out the liver and eggs, and discarding the gall bladder and the sand bag intact. Any error there ruins the dish, and none of it is described on this page.
- Turtle and raw-shellfish pathogensTurtle pathogens -- Wild-caught reptiles are a recognised reservoir of Salmonella, and this dish involves exactly the kind of prolonged contact with a live animal and its viscera that makes careful handling and thorough cooking essential.
- If you want the flavour of the periodRead this as a document rather than a plan. A modern cream-and-mushroom velouté over poached fish or chicken, from a current recipe, occupies the same place on a menu without the legal and conservation problems.
Terrapin was the great luxury of nineteenth-century American dining, ranked with canvasback duck and oysters on hotel and club menus from Baltimore to Delmonico's. "Washington" and "Baltimore" styles were among the recognised preparations, the Maryland versions built on the terrapin's own liver and eggs with cream and sherry, and the name here simply signals which of those conventions the sauce follows. Within a generation of this printing the dish had all but vanished from restaurant menus, for reasons usually said to include the depletion of the supply, Prohibition's removal of the sherry and madeira service, and changing fashion.