No. 1084

Terrapin a la Crisfied

Terrapene a la Crisfield

Heat well four ounces of butter in a sautoir, and place a quart of cooked and drained terrapin into it, season with salt and cayenne, and fry the terrapin for a few minutes, then add one pint of good fresh cream. Reduce this cream to half, thickening with a tablespoonful of rice flour diluted with half a gill of sweet cream; pour in when ready to serve, half a gill of good sherry wine.

← No. 1083 Terrapin a la Baltimore Terrapin No. 1085 Terrapin a la Maryland or Delmonico →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a short finishing sauce built on meat that can no longer be legally or ethically obtained in most places. The notes below explain the terms and why the dish belongs to reading rather than cooking.

The terrapin itselfThe Epicurean means the diamondback terrapin, Malaclemys terrapin, taken from Atlantic and Gulf brackish marshes. It is now listed as vulnerable, and harvest, possession and sale are prohibited or tightly restricted across its range, including Maryland, which closed its commercial fishery in 2007. There is no lawful supply for a home cook.
Why no substitution is offeredTerrapin cookery of this period prized the gelatinous fat and, in some preparations, the liver and eggs of a specific animal, though this recipe specifies only the cooked meat; swapping in another turtle raises the same conservation and permit problems, and imported farmed turtle carries its own legal and Salmonella concerns. If you want a sherry-and-cream stew, use a current recipe for something else.
"Cooked and drained"Ranhofer assumes you have already worked through his preliminary instructions elsewhere in the terrapin section: scalding, drawing, discarding the gall bladder and sand bag, and simmering the meat until tender. Nothing here describes that, so the recipe is unusable on its own terms as well.
A gillHalf a cup. Half a gill, called for twice, is four tablespoons — once of cream to slake the rice flour, once of sherry at the finish.
A sautoirA straight-sided shallow pan, roughly a modern sauté pan or wide saucepan. It is stovetop work throughout; no oven is involved.
Rice flour as thickenerFinely milled rice flour was one of the binders used for delicate cream sauces in this period; it thickens without the raw-flour taste of a roux and stays comparatively glossy. It is still sold, and behaves the same way, in dishes that can actually be made.
Sherry off the heatSherry at the finish -- The wine goes in at the very end, essentially uncooked, so the aromatics survive. That instruction is the one piece of technique here worth carrying to other cream sauces.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's, gave terrapin its own section in The Epicurean (1894) with a run of numbered variations, a sign of how prominent the dish was in expensive American dining in the second half of the nineteenth century. Diamondback terrapin stewed in cream, butter and sherry was a canonical luxury course from Baltimore to New York, ranked with canvasback duck among the period's costly dishes. The name here points to Crisfield, Maryland, the Chesapeake town that grew rich shipping seafood north by rail. Demand of this kind emptied the marshes: catches collapsed in the early twentieth century, the fashion died with them, and the species is now protected across most of its range.