Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Mock Terrapin Soup
Mock Terrapin Soup
Chop into small pieces two pounds of roasted or boiled beef, put into a saucepan, pour in one breakfast cupful each of milk and wine, and add two ounces of butter rolled in flour, two or three tablespoonfuls of made mustard, and a little grated nutmeg. Place the saucepan on the fire, boil for about fifteen or twenty minutes, turn into a tureen and serve.
A leftovers dish dressed in the vocabulary of a luxury course. The instructions are terse to the point of being a sketch, so a few decisions are left to the cook.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup — reckon 8 to 10 fl oz. One cup each of milk and wine is a safe reading, giving roughly a pint of liquid for two pounds of meat, which is thick for a soup and closer to a stew.
- Made mustard"Made" mustard means prepared, wet mustard from the jar, not dry powder. Two or three tablespoons of a sharp English-style prepared mustard is assertive; start with one and taste, since modern jarred mustards vary widely in heat and vinegar.
- What wineTerrapin was conventionally cooked with Madeira or dry sherry, and either suits this better than a table wine. Anything sweet will fight the mustard.
- Butter rolled in flourButter kneaded or dusted with flour, working much like a beurre mani s; two tablespoons of flour to the two ounces of butter gives a light thickening. The recipe adds it at the outset with the liquid; working it in in pieces as the liquid warms will help it disperse rather than sit in lumps.
- The hinge: don't let it boil hardMilk, wine and mustard together curdle readily. Bring it only to a bare simmer and hold it there; the fifteen to twenty minutes is for the flour to cook out and the sauce to bind, not for the meat, which is already cooked.
- The beefUse roast or boiled beef that is already tender — brisket, chuck or the end of a Sunday roast. Chop it fine, about a quarter-inch dice, so it suspends in the sauce rather than sinking.
- YieldTwo pounds of meat in a pint of sauce serves four to six as a first course. Serve it in a warmed tureen with toast or dry crackers, as terrapin itself was served.
Terrapin — specifically the diamondback terrapin of the Atlantic marshes — was one of the great status foods of the American Gilded Age, and the Waldorf served it stewed with cream and Madeira at prices that put it out of most reach. "Mock" dishes of this kind were the standard nineteenth-century answer to an expensive ingredient: mock turtle soup from a calf's head, mock oysters from corn, and here mock terrapin from chopped cooked beef seasoned to mimic the rich, mustard-and-Madeira sauce that carried the real thing. What survives in the imitation is the seasoning rather than the substance, which is the usual pattern. The dish also does quiet household work, turning the remains of a joint into something that could be sent to table in a tureen. Wild diamondback terrapin populations collapsed under exactly the demand hotels like the Waldorf created, and the species is now protected or restricted across much of its range, so the mock version is the only one most cooks will ever meet.