No. 1090a

Terrapin a la Trenton

Terrapene a la Trenton

Prepare two terrapins, each weighing three pounds; when cooked and ready, as explained in No. 1082, add one pint of cream and reduce to half; then thicken with three hard-boiled eggs reduced to a paste with three ounces of butter and three coffeespoonfuls of fecula diluted in three spoonfuls of good sherry. Season with salt, freshly ground black pepper, a teaspoonful of paprika and a teaspoonful of powdered sweet Spanish peppers; finish with a little good sherry.

← No. 1090 Stewed Terrapin with Madeira Wine Terrapin No. 1090b Terrapin, Epicurean Style →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a finishing sauce for a dish whose main ingredient can no longer legally or ethically be bought in most of the United States. The notes below explain the obstacles rather than offering a way around them.

The terrapin itselfThe diamondback terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin) of Ranhofer's kitchen was hunted to commercial collapse by the early twentieth century. Commercial harvest and sale are now prohibited or tightly restricted across much of its Atlantic and Gulf range, and it is listed as a species of concern or as threatened in several states. Turtle sold as "terrapin" today is generally not this animal and will not behave as this recipe assumes.
The instructions are incomplete on the pageEverything about cleaning and cooking the terrapin lives in No. 1082, which this entry only cross-references. As printed here there is no cooking method at all, only a sauce.
Turtle butchery is not a home skillThe gall bladder and the intestinal contents must be removed without rupture, and reptile flesh routinely carries Salmonella. Wild-caught freshwater and estuarine turtles also concentrate mercury and PCBs in fat and liver.
FeculaRanhofer's fécule is potato starch, used as a light thickener that sets clear rather than cloudy. It appears throughout The Epicurean where a cook today would reach for cornstarch or arrowroot.
"Powdered sweet Spanish peppers"Probably a sweet Spanish pimentón, milder than the paprika listed alongside it. The two may be intended as a contrast of pungency and sweetness rather than a duplication, though the recipe does not say so.
CoffeespoonfulA nineteenth-century coffeespoon is small, somewhere between a half and a full teaspoon; a "spoonful" unqualified in this book generally means a tablespoon. Three coffeespoons of starch into a pint of cream reduced by half gives a sauce that coats heavily.
If you want the sauceThe egg-and-butter liaison thickened with starch and sherry is a genuine period technique worth knowing, but pair it with a current recipe for a legal ingredient rather than adapting this one.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its terrapin recipes are a fair measure of how completely the diamondback terrapin dominated luxury American menus in the Gilded Age. Terrapin stew, thick with cream, hard-boiled egg and Madeira or sherry, was the dish that signalled expense at a banquet, ranked with canvasback duck and green turtle soup. Dishes named for cities in this book generally mark either a regional style or the customer who ordered it first; which applies here is not documented. Demand of exactly this kind emptied the marshes: by the 1920s terrapin had become scarce and expensive enough to drop off menus, and the fashion never returned. The recipe survives now mainly as evidence of what a nineteenth-century restaurant could take for granted.