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Terrapin Steaks
Cut the meat of a terrapin into slice or steaks, sprinkle them over with salt and pepper, place a few lumps of butter on them and either fry them in a fryingpan or broil them on a gridiron. When done place them on a dish and serve very hot; or they may be dipped in butter before being salted and peppered, covered with melted breadcrumbs and then cooked.
The obstacle here is not technique but the animal. The terrapin of the Waldorf's menus was the diamondback terrapin of Atlantic salt marshes, and it can no longer be taken or bought as this recipe assumes.
- The species is now protectedThe species is heavily restricted -- Diamondback terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin) was listed on CITES Appendix II in 2013, and commercial harvest is prohibited or tightly licensed across most of its range, with several states banning collection outright. Legal retail supply of the meat this recipe assumes is effectively unavailable.
- Wild-caught reptile and pathogensTurtles and terrapins are reservoirs of Salmonella, which is carried in the gut and shed onto the shell and flesh during butchering. Home dressing of a wild reptile with no controlled handling or verified internal temperature is a genuine infection risk, not a squeamishness issue.
- Marsh contaminantsEstuarine turtles are long-lived and can accumulate mercury and other contaminants in muscle and fat. Local consumption advisories may apply.
- What the instructions leave outThe recipe assumes the reader has already killed, scalded, dressed and picked a live terrapin. Without those steps the recipe is not followable in any case.
- On the "melted breadcrumbs"Possibly a misprint for melted butter and breadcrumbs; the alternative method reads as a standard butter-and-crumb coating before cooking.
- If you want the dishCook something else. Any current recipe for a farmed or wild-caught fish steak, or for snapping turtle from a licensed supplier where that is legal, will give the plain butter-and-gridiron treatment this page is really describing.
Terrapin was the great luxury of American restaurant cooking between roughly 1880 and the First World War, and the Waldorf's kitchen served it prominently: terrapin stewed with cream, egg yolk and sherry sat beside canvasback duck at the top of the menu. That popularity is exactly what ended it, and the terrapin fishery crashed in the early twentieth century, the species declining sharply under the pressure of the table. Oscar's inclusion of a simple broiled steak may be telling: it could be what a kitchen does with an ingredient it has in real quantity, the plain treatment offered alongside the elaborate one. A modern reader looking at this short paragraph is looking at abundance that no longer exists.