Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Stewed Terrapins
Stewed Terrapins
Cut the flesh off some small terrapins in little pieces, and put them over the fire in a stewpan, together with a seasoning of pepper and salt, a little cayenne pepper and a small piece of butter. Let them stew in the butter for a short time, add one wineglassful of water for each terrapin, and put in at the same time a piece of butter rolled in flour; stew for ten minutes, then add for each terrapin one wineglassful of white wine, and let it stew for another five minutes; then move the pan to the side of the fire, and stir in some beaten yolks of eggs, allowing one yolk to two terrapins. Cover the pan tightly and let it stand for five or six minutes. Then pour the terrapins, sauce and all, into a tureen and serve.
Stewed Terrapin, Baltimore Style Prepare two medium sized terrapins. Make one pint or so of mirepoix sauce, add to it one tablespoonful of flour and bake for fifteen minutes; moisten with one wineglassful of Madeira wine and one breakfast cupful of strong broth. Stir constantly, season with a small pinch of salt and a very little cayenne pepper, and reduce the liquor to half its original quantity. Cut the terrapins into small pieces, throwing the ends of the claws away; place the pieces in a stewpan, straining the sauce over them and finish with one ounce of fresh butter, also the juice of a lemon. Then dish up and serve. Stewed Terrapin, Maryland Style Carefully cut up two terrapins, place them in a saucepan with one wineglassful of good Madeira wine, a small pinch of salt, a little cayenne pepper, and an ounce or two of good butter. Mix thoroughly one breakfast cupful of sweet cream with the yolks of three boiled eggs, and add it to the terrapin, stirring continually while thoroughly heating, but without letting it come to a boil. Turn the whole into a tureen, and serve it very hot.
Three variations on a dish that was the high-water mark of American luxury dining, and that a modern cook cannot legally or safely reproduce. The notes below explain what the recipe assumes and why it is now a historical document rather than a set of instructions.
- The animal itself"Terrapin" here means the diamondback terrapin, Malaclemys terrapin, of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Commercial harvest collapsed under exactly the demand recipes like this created; the species is now protected or its take heavily restricted across its range, and it was listed on CITES Appendix II in 2013. There is no lawful supermarket source and no substitute that the recipe would recognise.
- "Prepare two terrapins""Prepare two medium sized terrapins" -- That phrase stands in for a page of work the period took for granted: plunging the live animal into boiling water, peeling the skin from the feet and head, opening the shell, and discarding the gall bladder and sand bag intact. A ruptured gall bladder was said to ruin the whole pot. None of it is set down here, presumably because the readers the book was written for were expected to know it already.
- Reptile meat and SalmonellaTurtles are a well-documented reservoir of Salmonella, which is why the US has restricted sales of small turtles since 1975. The Maryland version is deliberately never brought to a boil, and the first version has beaten raw yolks stirred in with the pan drawn to the side of the fire and left to stand; the meat in the first version does stew, but neither the raw yolk there nor the terrapin in the Maryland version can be assumed to reach a temperature that would deal with it.
- Wineglassful and breakfast cupfulFor reading the proportions: a wineglassful in a book of this period is about 2 fl oz, a breakfast cupful roughly 8 to 10 fl oz. The liquid is scaled per animal rather than by volume, which tells you how variable the yield was.
- Mirepoix sauceIn the Baltimore version this appears to mean not raw diced vegetables but a sauce built on them; the instruction to "bake for fifteen minutes" after adding the flour is most likely a direction to cook the flour out in the oven so it loses its raw taste. In current usage the word ordinarily refers to the vegetables alone.
- If you want to cook something from this pageUse a current recipe for a lawful ingredient. The technique the three versions share is worth studying, but the dish should be read, not attempted.
Terrapin stew was, for roughly the half-century either side of 1900, among the most expensive things on an American menu, and Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf was one of the rooms that made it so. The diamondback terrapin was a Chesapeake creature, cheap enough in the early nineteenth century to be fed to enslaved workers and prisoners by some accounts, and by the 1890s selling for figures that put it alongside canvasback duck and green turtle as the trinity of gilded-age display food; "Baltimore style" and "Maryland style" in the headings are provenance claims, since the Chesapeake was the acknowledged source and the local styles were argued over in print. The Maryland version uses cream and hard-boiled yolks and an absolute prohibition on boiling; the Madeira is not incidental, as that wine was the standard fortified accompaniment to terrapin in the Mid-Atlantic. The market's own success finished it: harvests fell off, Prohibition removed the Madeira, and by mid-century the dish had largely disappeared from restaurant cooking, leaving pages like this one as the record of a taste no longer available.