No. 1090b

Terrapin, Epicurean Style

Terrapene a l'Epicurienne

The diamond-back Chesapeake, Maryland terrapins are considered the best. They must be freshly caught. Long Island terrapins are also much liked by epicures, some averring that they are as fine as the Chesapeake, but this is not a fact, and I do not hesitate to class them according to the following order: First, the Chesapeake, then the Long Island, Virginia, Charleston and Savannah, North Carolina, Florida, Mississippi and Texas, the Gulf, Mobile, etc. Take two terrapins, each one of three pounds weight, and prepare them as described in No. 1082. Fry in two ounces of butter, adding two ounces of rice flour well mingled in; moisten with water as high as the terrapin and let boil until thoroughly cooked, seasoning with salt and pepper; add a pint of cream and reduce; finish with three hard-boiled egg-yolks, pounded and formed into a paste with three tablespoonfuls of good sherry wine. Serve separately on a folded napkin some very small oysters, drained and rolled in cracker dust, then fried in butter; surround these with quartered lemons.

TURTLE (Tortue).

An amphibious quadruped, having all its body, except the head, feet, and tail, covered with a very hard shell. It is enclosed in a cuirass composed of two pieces; the one covering the back is called the carapace; this is convex shaped; the vertebra are attached to it. The underneath one is attached to the breast; this is flat and is called the plastron. The choicest and most delicate part of the turtle is that attached to the upper shell.

← No. 1090a Terrapin a la Trenton Terrapin No. 1091 Turtle, Havana Style →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a period luxury dish built on an animal that can no longer legally be taken or bought in most of its former range. The notes below explain what the text is asking for and why the dish is closed to modern cooks.

The animal is protectedThe diamondback terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin) was harvested nearly to collapse by exactly the trade this recipe served. Maryland closed its commercial terrapin fishery in 2007, and the species is protected or its take restricted in most of the Atlantic and Gulf states Ranhofer lists; it is also on CITES Appendix II. There is in practice no lawful commercial source for a wild terrapin of this size, and anyone considering it should check current state law.
No substitution is offeredFarmed freshwater turtle, snapping turtle and mock-turtle preparations are all different dishes with different handling requirements. If you want to cook in this idiom, work from a current recipe for a legal species rather than adapting this one.
The cross-reference does the butcheringThe direction to prepare the terrapins as described in an earlier recipe hides the whole of the work: the killing, scalding and cleaning of the live animal, including removal of the gall bladder and sand bag. None of that is repeated on this page, so the recipe as printed here is not self-contained.
Rice flour as thickenerTwo ounces of rice flour "well mingled in" with the butter thickens the sauce with rice starch rather than wheat. Rice flour was a common thickener in kitchens of this period.
Egg-yolk paste, not a liaisonThe three hard-boiled yolks are pounded with the sherry into a paste and used to finish the sauce, giving body and colour rather than acting as a raw-yolk liaison.
The fried oystersVery small oysters rolled in cracker dust and fried in butter want under two minutes, and the original correctly treats them as a separate garnish served dry on a napkin. Held long, they weep and the coating slumps.
ScaleThe recipe gives no yield, but two three-pound terrapins with a pint of cream reduced into the sauce suggests a course for several diners rather than a single main plate.

A Little History

Terrapin was the defining American luxury of the nineteenth-century restaurant table, ranked with canvasback duck and Chesapeake oysters, and Ranhofer devotes a whole run of numbered recipes to it at Delmonico's — Baltimore style, Trenton style, Maryland style, and this "Epicurienne." The ranking of provenance at the head of the entry, Chesapeake first and the Gulf last, is the language of an oyster or wine list applied to a reptile, and it tells you how seriously the trade graded its stock. That grading is also the epitaph: sustained demand from hotels in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore stripped the tidal marshes, and by the early twentieth century terrapin had become scarce and ruinously expensive before falling out of fashion altogether. The closing paragraph on the carapace and plastron is a reminder that these books doubled as reference works, and that a cook was expected to know the anatomy before he knew the sauce.