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Terrapin, Baltimore
Plunge a large diamond-back terrapin in boiling water for two minutes, take up and with a coarse towel pull off skin from the head, neck and feet. Place terrapin in a saucepan containing two gallons boiling water and one tablespoon salt, let boil for an hour, or until feet are soft to the touch, lift up with a skimmer and let drain for ten minutes. Remove both shells, cut off nails with a pair of scissors and take out intestines, also gall bag from liver, being very careful not to break it, as that would be sufficient to spoil terrapin. Cut liver in small squares and keep on a plate with the eggs until required.
Cut all the meat and bones of terrapin into half-inch pieces and place in a small saucepan with a gill sherry, two tablespoons port wine and a tablespoon brandy. Tie in a small cheesecloth a half sprig thyme, crushed bay leaf, clove, blade mace, and twelve allspice, add to terrapin and season with a good teaspoon salt and two saltspoons cayenne, cover pan and let gently cook for forty-five minutes. Take up cloth with herbs, add a truffle cut into very small squares, the liver, eggs, one and a half gills demi-glace, lightly mix and let gently boil for ten minutes. Shift pan to a corner of range, mix in little by little an ounce fresh butter, shuffle pan while adding, transfer terrapin to a chafing dish or silver soup tureen and serve.
This is the full Baltimore treatment of diamond-back terrapin, written when the animal was still a commercial food item. It cannot be reproduced today, and the reasons are legal as much as culinary.
- The animal is protectedMalaclemys terrapin, the diamond-back, is no longer a market species. Maryland closed its commercial terrapin fishery in 2007, and the turtle is listed as a species of concern or given outright protection across most of its Atlantic and Gulf range. Taking, buying or selling one is a wildlife offence in nearly every state where it lives, and it is additionally listed under CITES Appendix II.
- Live scaldingThe recipe begins by plunging a living animal into boiling water and then boiling it for an hour. This is a slaughter method that would not pass any current humane-handling standard, and no modern kitchen has cause to attempt it.
- The gall bagThe warning is real and is the hinge of the old method: rupturing the gall bladder while drawing the liver floods the meat with bile and makes the whole pot inedibly bitter. This recipe treats a broken gall as enough to spoil the terrapin outright.
- No substitution is offeredSnapping turtle, alligator and veal have all been proposed over the years as stand-ins, but the dish as written is a specific preparation of a specific protected animal. If you want the sherry-and-demi-glace stew idiom, work from a current recipe built around a legal ingredient.
- Reading the old measuresFor anyone parsing the text rather than cooking it: a gill is half a cup, so the sherry is 4 fl oz and the demi-glace 6 fl oz. A saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon, making two saltspoons of cayenne a genuinely fierce amount. A blade of mace is one dried strip of nutmeg aril.
- Demi-glaceBrown veal stock reduced with sauce espagnole to a syrupy, deeply gelatinous glaze, typically kept ready in the sauce station of a large hotel kitchen. It is the element that gives this terrapin its body: no flour is added in the recipe itself, though the espagnole underlying a demi-glace is roux-based.
Terrapin was the great luxury of the Chesapeake table, and "Baltimore style" — meat and liver bound with a brown sauce and lifted with sherry, port and brandy — was the version hotel and club kitchens in New York and Washington copied. The turtle had come up in the world: eighteenth-century accounts treat it as cheap food, and it is often said that Maryland slaveholders and boarding-house keepers fed it to those they could not afford to feed better. By the 1880s it was appearing on banquet menus at prices that rivalled canvasback duck, and the chafing dish or silver tureen specified here signals exactly that setting. Demand of this kind is what emptied the marshes; landings collapsed in the early twentieth century and never recovered, which is why a dish that once defined American fine dining now survives only on the page.