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Fricassee of Terrapin
Put the meat of two or three terrapins into a saucepan with a little butter and a bunch of parsley and sweet herbs; cook until it is slightly colored, sprinkle in salt and pepper to taste and one tablespoonful of flour and pour in gradually sufficient cream to cover. Boil for four minutes without stirring, then add one wineglass of sherry; boil again for ten minutes, take the saucepan from the fire, thicken with the beaten yolks of four eggs, remove the bunch of sweet herbs and parsley, add five ounces of butter broken up into small pieces, turn the whole out on to a dish and serve with minced parsley sprinkled over it.
This is a Waldorf dining-room dish built on an ingredient that is no longer available to cooks, and for good reason. The notes below explain what the recipe assumes and why it cannot be followed today.
- The terrapin itselfThe diamondback terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin) was the luxury turtle of the American table, and the appetite recorded in books like this one is generally held to be a large part of why its populations collapsed. It is listed as vulnerable internationally, and taking, possessing or selling it is prohibited or tightly restricted through much of its Atlantic and Gulf coast range; commercial harvest for the table is banned or heavily restricted in most states.
- No substitute is impliedSnapping turtle, sea turtle and imported farmed turtle each carry their own legal restrictions, and sea turtles are protected outright. If the dish appeals, a current recipe using a legal ingredient should be used instead.
- The recipe begins mid-process"The meat of two or three terrapins" hides an entire day's work. Nineteenth-century kitchens killed, scalded, drew and parboiled the animals themselves, discarding the gall bladder and sand bag, and any error there ruined the dish. The method here simply assumes the meat has already been cleaned and cooked.
- Reptile handlingTurtles and their raw meat are a well-documented source of Salmonella.
- What the measures mean, for readingA wineglass in period American cookbooks is about two fluid ounces. The four egg yolks are a liaison, meant to be added off the heat so they thicken without scrambling — the one point of technique in the whole method.
- Why it is hereTerrapin appears in this book as a marker of the Waldorf's ambition rather than as everyday cooking, alongside canvasback duck and other trophy ingredients of the 1890s dining room.
Terrapin stew and fricassee were the height of American restaurant luxury through the nineteenth century and into the First World War, particularly in Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, where Maryland diamondbacks commanded prices that put them beside canvasback duck, and the dish was traditionally served with a glass of something fortified — sherry or Madeira as often as champagne. The name comes to English from an Algonquian word for the small brackish-water turtle, and the animal had once been common enough on the Chesapeake that it is often said to have been fed to enslaved laborers and apprentices before fashion turned it into a delicacy. Oscar Tschirky's version is the Continental treatment — herbs, cream, sherry, an egg-yolk liaison and a great deal of finishing butter — rather than the Maryland style, which was distinguished less by richness, since it too used butter, cream and fortified wine, than by its reliance on the turtle's own eggs and liquor. Demand of exactly this kind emptied the marshes, and by the 1920s the dish had quietly left American menus. It survives now mainly as a name on old bills of fare and in the conservation laws written afterward.