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Terrapin with Mushrooms
To one pint of white sauce add one-half terrapin cut in inch pieces and one-half pint of chopped mushrooms. Cook in double boiler for twenty minutes or until thoroughly hot. Serve on toast.
TERRAPIN À LA NEWBERG-Use recipe for Lobster à la Newberg given in Chapter on Chafing-dish Recipes.
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This is a short chafing-dish-era assembly rather than a technical recipe, but its central ingredient puts it out of reach. The notes below explain what the original assumed and why the dish cannot be reproduced.
- The terrapin is the problem"Terrapin" in an American cookbook of this period means the diamondback terrapin, Malaclemys terrapin, taken from Atlantic and Gulf salt marshes. Decades of commercial harvesting for exactly this kind of dish collapsed the populations; the animal is now protected or its harvest restricted across most of its range, and it is listed under CITES Appendix II. A home cook is very unlikely to find a lawful supply.
- No substitute is intendedNothing sold today occupies the same place — the appeal was the terrapin's own liver and eggs and its gelatinous meat, which is why the original needs only white sauce, mushrooms and toast to carry it. If you want a creamed dish on toast, use a current recipe written around an ingredient you can actually buy.
- "One-half terrapin" was a market unitTerrapin were sold live by the dozen and graded by shell length, so half a terrapin meant half the picked meat of one animal, probably only a few ounces. The recipe gives no weight, presumably because the reader was expected to buy the creature, not the meat.
- What the sauce assumedWhite sauce in this book is a flour-and-butter roux with milk or cream, made in the proportions given elsewhere in the same volume; the amount here is generous relative to the meat, terrapin being an expensive ingredient.
- The double boiler is deliberateTwenty minutes over water, not over direct heat, was standard for cream-sauce dishes of this kind: the point was to bring everything hot without breaking or scorching the sauce. It is a reheating step, not a cooking step.
- The cross-referenceThe trailing "Terrapin à la Newberg" simply redirects to the lobster Newberg formula in the chafing-dish chapter — cream, egg yolk, sherry or Madeira. It is the same protected animal in a richer sauce and is subject to the same objection.
Terrapin was the definitive luxury dish of the American Gilded Age table, ranked with canvasback duck and oysters, and Baltimore and Philadelphia cooks argued at length over whether the sauce should carry cream, sherry or Madeira. Its prestige is the reason a mail-order pattern company's household cookbook carried terrapin recipes at all: the book was selling aspiration as much as instruction, and a reader in a town with no terrapin dealer could still read the page. That popularity is also what finished the animal off as a food. Wild stocks were fished down hard through the late nineteenth century, prices climbed, and by the 1920s the federal government was funding terrapin-farming experiments at Beaufort, North Carolina, in an effort to keep up with demand. Prohibition, which removed the wine the sauces depended on, is often credited with breaking the fashion; the collapse of the supply had at least as much to do with it. The recipes survive in books like this one as a record of a taste that consumed its own subject.