No. 1088

Terrapin, Maryland Club

Terrapene, Maryland Club

Have the terrapin ready and cooked as for No. 1082. For one quart of it, place four ounces of butter in a sautoir on the fire; let it heat and skim it well until it begins to become (nut butter); add to it the terrapin, and season with salt, cayenne and black pepper, also half a gill of good sherry. It can also be prepared by placing it in a chafing dish with salt, cayenne, fresh butter, and half a gill of good sherry.

← No. 1087 Terrapin, Ancient Style Terrapin No. 1089 Cutlets of Terrapin and Croquettes, Cream Sa →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

The technique here is trivial — browned butter, seasoning, sherry — but the main ingredient is no longer something a cook may buy or take. The notes below explain the terms and the legal problem.

The terrapin itself"Terrapene" here means the diamondback terrapin, Malaclemys terrapin, the brackish-marsh turtle of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Maryland closed its commercial terrapin fishery in 2007, and many other states prohibit or sharply restrict take; the species is treated as one of conservation concern over much of its range. There is effectively no legal commercial supply.
Not solved by substitutionSnapping turtle and farmed softshell are sold in some markets, but they are different meats with different fat, gelatin and cooking behaviour, and the recipe's whole point is the liver, eggs and dark meat of a dressed terrapin as prepared in No. 1082. If you want turtle, work from a current recipe written for the species you can actually obtain legally.
Wild-caught turtle generallyBeyond the legal question, wild freshwater and estuarine turtles are a known source of Salmonella, and long-lived reptiles from coastal waters accumulate mercury and PCBs. This is a separate reason the dish has left the repertoire.
"For one quart of it"The quart is the volume of cooked, dressed terrapin from No. 1082 — meat, liver and eggs in their own liquor — not a quart of raw turtle. Ranhofer states no yield; a quart so dressed would serve several as a course.
Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of sherry is two fluid ounces, or four tablespoons. The recipe asks only for "good sherry" and does not specify a style.
Sautoir and nut butterA sautoir is a straight-sided sauté pan. "Nut butter" is beurre noisette — butter cooked past the foaming stage until the milk solids toast and it smells of hazelnut, which is why he tells you to skim it first.
The chafing dish variantThe second method uses a chafing dish with fresh butter rather than browned. Ranhofer gives no further detail about how or where it was served.

A Little History

Terrapin was the great luxury of nineteenth-century American dining, and Maryland was its centre — the diamondback taken from Chesapeake marshes was shipped live to hotels and clubs in New York, Philadelphia and Washington and priced accordingly. Charles Ranhofer, chef of Delmonico's, gives a number of terrapin preparations in The Epicurean (1894), which tells you how firmly the dish sat at the top of a fashionable menu; naming this one for the Maryland Club, founded in Baltimore in 1857, was a nod to what was often said to be the authority on the subject — butter, sherry, cayenne, and nothing to obscure the liver and eggs. The demand that made those recipes possible is precisely what emptied the marshes: by the 1920s catches had collapsed, prices had risen out of reach, and terrapin passed out of American cooking within a generation.