No. 1085

Terrapin a la Maryland or Delmonico

Terrapene a la Newberg ou a la Delmonico

Prepare and cook the terrapin the same as No. 1082. For each quart, add a half a pint of cream, reduce to half, season with salt and cayenne pepper, thicken with five raw egg-yolks diluted with half a pint of cream, and two ounces of fresh butter, toss the terrapin while adding the thickening; this must not boil, finishing with half a gill of very good sherry wine or Madeira. The sauce should be thick and served very hot.

← No. 1084 Terrapin a la Crisfied Terrapin No. 1087 Terrapin, Ancient Style →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a Gilded Age luxury dish built on an animal that can no longer legally be taken or bought in most of its range. The notes below are for reading the recipe, not for cooking it.

The animal is protectedThe diamondback terrapin, Malaclemys terrapin, was commercially fished nearly to collapse by the early twentieth century. Harvest and sale are now prohibited or tightly restricted throughout the Chesapeake and the Atlantic states, and the species was listed under CITES Appendix II in 2013. There is no lawful supply chain for a wild terrapin to cook this way.
The missing half of the recipeEverything about killing, scalding, drawing and cooking the terrapin sits in No. 1082, which this entry only cross-references and which is not reproduced here. Ranhofer's terrapin preparation begins with a live animal and depends on removing the gall bladder without breaking it. If you want turtle in a cream sauce at all, work from a current recipe using farmed or otherwise legal meat.
The egg-yolk liaisonFive raw yolks slackened with cream and thickened without boiling — Ranhofer's own instruction is that it "must not boil" — may not reach a temperature that pasteurises the eggs. In 1894 that was simply good technique; today it should be treated as a lightly cooked egg sauce, and the risk falls on whoever eats it.
Reading the measuresA gill is 4 fluid ounces in American usage, so a half gill of sherry is 2 ounces, about a quarter cup. "For each quart" is not defined on the page; it most likely means each quart of picked terrapin meat and its cooking liquor rather than a quart of finished sauce.
Newburg, not MarylandThe heading here reads Terrapene a la Newberg ou a la Delmonico, while the page title says Maryland. Maryland-style terrapin is the plainer treatment — butter, the liver, cream, sherry — where the Newburg version adds the yolk-and-cream thickening that makes it a Delmonico's house dish.
Sherry at the endThe wine goes in at the finish. Added earlier it would cook off, and in an egg-thickened sauce added acid can encourage curdling — though the recipe gives no reason of its own.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer was chef at Delmonico's in New York for some thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire set down in print. Terrapin was among the most fashionable American luxuries of the period: shipped alive from the Chesapeake and Long Island Sound, it appeared at banquets alongside canvasback duck, and terrapin stew was served at gentlemen's club dinners in Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. Delmonico's kept several styles on the card at once, which is why the numbered entries run in sequence — Crisfield, Newburg, "ancient style" — each a different sauce over the same laboriously picked meat. The vogue was its undoing: demand of this kind stripped the tidal marshes, prices climbed to figures that make the dish read as pure ostentation, and by the 1920s terrapin had largely vanished from menus. The recipe now survives mainly as evidence of what a nineteenth-century American fine-dining kitchen considered ordinary.