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Mock Terrapin Soup
For the mock terrapin soup, take one pound and a quarter of calf's liver and put into salt boiling water for half an hour; add small herbs, add three peppercorns, three cloves, two slices of onion, carrot, when the vegetables are done, take them out and mash by putting them through a sieve; make a Spanish sauce of salt pork or bacon, fried enough to get the fat out of it, put into the fat a slice of onion, a little celery, one-half dozen pepper corns (or little sweet pepper), one-half cupful of tomato, and cook brown; take one teaspoonful salad-oil, one yolk of hard boiled egg, dust of cayenne pepper; roll to paste, and make into small, round balls; put these into Spanish sauce; then put the sauce into the soup; when they come to the top, skim them out; put in the tureen one glass of wine and slice of lemon, and pour in the soup; then cut the calf's liver into small bits and add it.
This is a nineteenth-century imitation of diamondback terrapin stew, and it reads as a set of notes rather than a full method — the cook of 1900 was expected to know what a Spanish sauce was and how much stock to use. A few things need filling in before it will work.
- The hinge: the egg balls stand in for terrapin eggsThe whole conceit of mock terrapin is the little yellow yolk balls, which imitate the unlaid eggs prized in real terrapin stew. Roll them no larger than a marble, add them at the very end, and lift them out the moment they float — much more than a minute or two and they break up and cloud the soup.
- There is no stated quantity of liquidThe recipe never says how much broth you end up with. As a working guess, around 6 cups: the salted water the liver cooked in, strained, with the sieved vegetables and the brown sauce stirred back in. That would serve about six as a first course, though the original gives no yield.
- "Spanish sauce"Sauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce, though here made a quick way: pork or bacon fat, aromatics, tomato, cooked to a good brown. Classic espagnole is bound with a roux, and a spoonful of flour cooked in the fat would do that here; the original calls for none and leans on the sieved vegetables for body.
- "Small herbs"Most likely sweet or pot herbs: a bundle of parsley, thyme and bay. Add it to the liver water and lift it out with the vegetables.
- Half an hour is long for liverCalf's liver held at a simmer for 30 minutes will be firm and dry, which may well be the point here, since it is diced small to imitate terrapin meat. The recipe says boiling water; holding it at a shiver instead keeps the liver from turning grainy and the broth from going grey.
- "One glass of wine"A wineglassful, usually reckoned at about 1/4 cup in period recipes, though usage varied. Madeira or a dry sherry suits terrapin; the wine goes into the tureen and the hot soup is poured over it.
- Sieving the vegetablesPressing the cooked onion and carrot through a sieve is the old way of thickening and enriching. A food mill or a short blitz with a stick blender gives much the same result.
- SaltBetween the salted cooking water and the salt pork, this can oversalt easily. Salt the liver water lightly and correct only at the end.
Diamondback terrapin was one of the great luxury foods of the American East Coast in the nineteenth century, a Chesapeake and Philadelphia specialty served in clubs and hotels with madeira stirred in at the table; the price rose steeply as the wild population was fished out, and a mock version came to have a real place on a middle-class table. Mock dishes of this kind — mock turtle from a calf's head, mock terrapin from liver — were not jokes but honest economies, built on the idea that the seasoning and the texture, not the animal, carried the dish. The tell here is the egg-yolk balls: real terrapin stew was judged largely on the eggs, so any imitation had to supply them, and a hard yolk worked to a paste with oil and cayenne was one common substitute. The madeira in the tureen is lifted straight from the genuine article.