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Vol-au-Vent of Terrapin
Put one breakfast cupful of terrapin stock into a saucepan with two or three cloves and a little mace or parsley, and boil it up; add one tablespoonful of browned flour mixed up with an equal amount of butter to thicken it, pour in one wineglassful of sherry wine, and strain the liquor into another saucepan. Add two breakfast cupfuls of terrapin meat cut up into small pieces, sprinkle on a little salt and cayenne, simmer gently at the side of the fire until the preparation is done. Have in readiness eight vol-au-vent cases lined with puff paste and baked, fill them with the terrapin mixture, and serve on a folded napkin spread over a dish.
The technique here is a straightforward velouté-style stew spooned into baked pastry shells, but the central ingredient is no longer one a cook can lawfully or ethically buy in most of the United States.
- TerrapinThe terrapin of Oscar's kitchen is the diamondback, Malaclemys terrapin, a brackish-water turtle that was hunted to commercial collapse in part because of dishes like this one. It is now protected to varying degrees across its Atlantic and Gulf range, with commercial harvest and sale prohibited in most states, and it carries a global conservation listing. For practical purposes a cook today cannot lawfully source terrapin stock or meat, and the recipe should not be attempted as written.
- No substitution givenSnapping turtle, alligator and chicken have all been proposed as stand-ins over the years, but wild-caught turtle raises its own legal and contamination questions. If the pastry and sauce appeal, work from a current recipe for a creamed filling in vol-au-vent cases.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup in period American usage is larger than a teacup and roughly the modern measuring cup, about 8 fl oz, though some households used one closer to 10. The proportion that matters is stock to meat, one to two.
- WineglassfulAbout 2 fl oz, not the volume of a modern stemmed glass. A full sherry-bottle pour would drown the sauce.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan or a slow oven until nut-coloured, then worked with butter. It thickens noticeably less than raw flour for the same weight and gives the sauce its expected tawny colour rather than a pale one.
- Side of the fireOn a coal range, the cooler edge of the top: a bare simmer. On a modern hob this is the lowest setting, and the point is to warm the cut-up meat through without boiling the thickened, sherried sauce.
- Vol-au-vent casesPuff pastry shells baked blind and hollowed, filled only at the moment of service so the pastry does not soften. The recipe makes eight cases; on a period menu a dish like this would usually have appeared as an entree rather than a main course.
Terrapin was the great luxury of nineteenth-century American dining, and Maryland-style terrapin stewed with cream, sherry and its own eggs was as much a fixture of banquet menus as canvasback duck. Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf from 1893, was writing at the peak of that fashion, when hotel kitchens in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore consumed diamondbacks by the barrel and the best specimens were graded and priced by the inch. The vol-au-vent presentation, French pastry filled with an American swamp turtle, is exactly the transatlantic register the Waldorf traded in. The fashion destroyed its own supply: by the 1920s terrapin populations had crashed, Prohibition is often said to have removed the sherry that defined the dish, and the stew slid off menus and into the historical record, where it now serves mainly as a reminder of how quickly a wild species can be eaten out of a coastline.