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Chicken a La Terrapin
For every pint of chopped chicken, three tablespoonfuls of butter, one cupful of cream, three hard boiled eggs. Rub yolks smooth, add to the chicken, add cream and stand over a moderate fire until heated; add whites of eggs pressed through a sieve. Season with salt and pepper and little parsley. Very rich.
A sandwich filling built on the classic terrapin formula: cooked meat bound with cream, butter and sieved hard-boiled egg. The instructions omit the butter after listing it, so read it as a cream sauce you assemble in a saucepan.
- Where the butter goesThe three tablespoons of butter are listed but never mentioned again. Melt them in the pan first, then add the chicken and the mashed yolks, then the cream.
- QuantitiesA pint of chopped chicken is about 2 cups packed, roughly the breast meat from a small roast bird or two large breasts. With one cup of cream and three eggs you get enough filling for something like 8 to 10 sandwiches, depending how thickly it is spread.
- "A moderate fire"Moderate heat on the stovetop, at the lower end if anything. The point is to warm the mixture through and let the yolks thicken the cream, not to boil it.
- The hinge: do not let it boilEgg yolk plus cream will curdle and weep if it simmers. Take it off as soon as it thickens enough to coat the spoon, and it will set further as it cools.
- Whites through a sievePressing the cooked whites through a coarse sieve gives fine even shreds rather than the wet lumps you get from chopping. Add them at the end so they stay distinct.
- Chicken textureChop by hand to a coarse mince. A food processor turns poached chicken to paste, and the filling loses the flake that makes it read as terrapin.
- ServingTerrapin mixtures were served warm in the original dish, but as a sandwich filling this wants to be cool and firm. Chill it before spreading, and keep it refrigerated -- it is a cream-and-egg mixture with no acid in it.
- SeasoningSalt generously; cream and egg flatten it badly. A grating of nutmeg, cayenne rather than black pepper, and a spoonful of sherry all appear in period terrapin recipes and suit this one.
Diamondback terrapin was one of the great luxury foods of nineteenth-century American dining, especially in Baltimore and Philadelphia, where it was stewed with butter, cream, sherry and the sieved yolks of hard-boiled eggs -- sometimes with the terrapin's own eggs. The dish was expensive enough that "mock terrapin" and "à la terrapin" versions using veal, calf's liver or chicken circulated widely in household cookbooks, borrowing the sauce and dropping the turtle. That is exactly what this entry does. The terrapin fishery collapsed from overharvesting in the early twentieth century, so the imitation has now long outlived the original.