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Baked Terrapin
Cut off the head of a terrapin, put it in a saucepan or pot with the shell on, and let it boil until the under shell can be removed easily. Take it out, pull out all the meat, cleaning the upper shell thoroughly; pick the meat to pieces, and mix it up with a few crackers and chopped onions, a small quantity each of allspice, black pepper, chopped parsley and butter, and pour over a small quantity of wine. Put this mixture into the top shell, place a few slices of lemon on the top, set it in the oven and bake. When done take it out and serve.
Baked Terrapins, Maryland Style Half fill a baking pan with dry gravel or sand, put it into an oven and make it quite hot; wash well three terrapins that have been killed, remove their heads, put them with the top shell downward in the sand and bake in the oven for an hour. Take them out, remove the under shell, gall bag and entrails and loosen the meat without taking it out of the back shell. Pull off the legs, skin them and lay them on the top. Put one breakfast cupful of butter in a basin to soften, mix in one teacupful of flour, one teaspoonful each of salt and black pepper and the juice of a lemon. Put a little more than one tablespoonful of this into each terrapin, place them back in the oven for a few minutes, take them out and serve on a napkin spread on a dish.
This is a recipe for a creature that can no longer be bought, taken, or cooked in most of its former range. The notes below explain why, and decode the older kitchen language for readers coming to the text as a historical document.
- The animal is the problemThe terrapin of Waldorf-era menus is the diamondback terrapin, Malaclemys terrapin. Commercial harvest is widely held responsible for the collapse of the population, and the species is now assessed as Vulnerable and listed on CITES Appendix II, with harvest and sale prohibited or tightly restricted across most Atlantic and Gulf states. Legal commercial supply is minimal to nonexistent.
- Other turtles are not a substituteSnapping turtle and several freshwater species are also regulated or closed to harvest depending on the state, and imported soft-shell turtle carries its own permit and inspection issues. Do not treat this as a recipe with a swappable main ingredient.
- Live killing and dressingThe method assumes the cook receives a live animal and boils or bakes it whole with the gall bag and entrails still inside, removing them afterward. Rupturing the gall bladder during that process contaminates the meat, and reptile carcasses carry a high baseline Salmonella load on shell and skin that this handling sequence does nothing to control.
- No temperature, no time you can trust"Boil until the under shell can be removed easily" and "bake" are the only doneness cues given, then the dressed meat goes back into the oven for "a few minutes." Nothing here establishes that the meat reaches a safe internal temperature.
- Reading the measuresA breakfast cupful is the larger vessel, usually reckoned at somewhere around 8-10 fl oz; a teacupful is smaller, commonly taken as about 6 fl oz. Neither was standardised. A gill is half a cup. The wine in the first version is unmeasured, as is the oven.
- The sand bathThe Maryland method uses a pan of gravel or sand preheated in the oven as a heat sink, so the shells sit in steady bottom heat rather than scorching. It is the one part of this page worth borrowing conceptually.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for a legal, farmed protein. Nothing on this page should be followed as written.
Terrapin was the great luxury of American hotel cookery between the Civil War and the First World War, and it appeared on the menus of kitchens like Oscar Tschirky's at the Waldorf alongside canvasback duck and green turtle soup. The word comes into English from an Algonquian source, and the Chesapeake diamondback was the prized form, with Maryland style but often a stew, though with butter, cream and sherry.<br><br>Demand was enormous, and that market is precisely why the animal is now protected. The recipe survives as a record of a fashion that ate its own supply, and of a period when an expensive dish was proved expensive by the amount of butter and sherry poured into it.<br><br>Oscar's book, published in 1896, appears to draw on the Waldorf's working repertoire rather than to have been written for home cooks, which is why the instructions assume a cook who already knows what a dressed terrapin looks like and needs only the seasoning proportions.</a>