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December 27
Menu: Terrapin, a la Maryland; Saratoga Chips; Roasted Capon, Oyster Sauce; Sweet Potatoes; Stewed Celery; Apple and Cabbage Salad; Hamburg Cream; Coffee Terrapin, a la Maryland-Put terrapin in kettle, cover with boiling salted water, add 2 slices each carrot and onion, and 1 stalk celery. Cook till meat is tender. Remove from water, cool, draw out nails from feet, cut under shell close to upper shell and remove. Empty upper shell, remove and discard gall bladder, sand bags and thick intestines. Liver, small intestines are used with meat. Add terrapin meat to 3/4 cup white stock, 2 tablespoons wine; cook slowly until liquor is reduced half. Add liver separated in pieces, 2 yolks of eggs, 1 tablespoon Crisco, salt, pepper, and red pepper to taste, 1 tablespoon flour mixed with 1/2 cup cream, and 1 teaspoon lemon juice. Make hot and just before serving add 1 tablespoon sherry wine. Turn into hot dish and garnish with toast points. and 1 tablespoon lemon juice. Cook in moderate oven for 3 hours. Send to table without removing cover.
This is a period luxury dish built around an animal that can no longer be taken or bought, and the text as printed has been corrupted in the original. The notes below explain why it should be read rather than cooked.
- The animal is protectedThe diamondback terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin) is the terrapin of Maryland cookery, and commercial harvest of it is now prohibited in Maryland and restricted or banned throughout its range on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. There is no lawful supply chain for it, and no substitute is offered here.
- No legal source, no safe handling protocolWild-caught turtles commonly carry Salmonella, and although the recipe boils the animal before it is dressed, the dressing itself — opening the shell and separating the gall bladder and intestines by hand on a work surface — is the kind of cross-contamination route modern food handling rules exist to close. The recipe gives no temperatures and no controls.
- The gall bladder instruction is not optional detailThe direction to remove and discard the gall bladder, sand bags and thick intestines is the hinge of the old method: a ruptured gall bladder makes the meat inedibly bitter, and the intestinal contents are the contamination risk.
- The text is two recipes run togetherEverything from "and 1 tablespoon lemon juice. Cook in moderate oven for 3 hours. Send to table without removing cover" appears to be stray text from another, covered dish on the same page; it has no relationship to the terrapin, which is finished in a pan on the stove. The header "Coffee" likewise looks like a stray from the page layout.
- "White stock" and the egg yolksWhite stock in a book of this period means veal or chicken stock made without browning the bones. The yolks, cream and flour form a liaison: the sauce is thickened over gentle heat and not boiled, or it curdles. Noted for reading, not for reproduction.
- If you want the dishCook a current, published recipe using a farmed or lawfully sold species, following its own handling and temperature guidance.
Terrapin stew was for decades among the most expensive dishes on an American menu — Chesapeake diamondbacks were shipped live to hotels in Philadelphia, New York and Washington, and the "a la Maryland" treatment is generally understood as the version enriched with cream, egg yolks and sherry rather than served in a clear broth. Its appearance in a Crisco promotional cookbook of this period is telling: Procter & Gamble were arguing that their new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening belonged in every kind of cooking, so the dinner-calendar recipes work a tablespoon of Crisco into dishes that had never needed it, terrapin included, alongside the plain cakes and pie crusts where the product actually made sense. The vogue collapsed under its own appetite; heavy harvesting through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, compounded by habitat loss, reduced populations so far that Maryland — the state whose name the dish carries, and whose official state reptile the terrapin is — closed commercial take in 2007. The recipe survives mainly as evidence of what a December dinner party once aspired to.