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Terrapin Without Wine
Drop the largest, finest cow terrapin obtainable in boiling water. Boil fifteen minutes, then cool in cold water. Place it on its back and remove the entrails, gall bag, claws, and rub off the outer skin on the legs. Divide the meat into neat pieces, put these in a stew pan with water sufficient to cover, season with salt and pepper only, and boil slowly one hour. When done, cool and put away in the ice box. When wanted put it in a chafing dish, add two ounces of the best table butter, stir thoroughly, season to taste, and when the ingredients are thoroughly incorporated, serve on hot plates. No wine is used in the preparation of the dish, nor should any be served with it.
This dish depends on an animal that can no longer be bought, and in most places can no longer be taken at all. The notes below explain why the page is now a historical document rather than a set of instructions.
- The animal is protectedThe "cow terrapin" of this recipe is a mature female diamondback terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin), the species that supported the nineteenth-century terrapin trade. It is now listed under CITES Appendix II, and harvest is prohibited or tightly restricted across its range on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts; several states protect gravid females specifically. There is no legal retail source.
- "Largest, finest cow" is the problemThe recipe deliberately calls for the biggest breeding female, prized because she carried eggs and fat. Heavy removal of large females was a major factor in the collapse of the terrapin fishery between roughly 1880 and 1920, and protection of large and gravid females is a feature of the modern rules.
- Live boilingThe instruction to drop the animal into boiling water and cook it fifteen minutes before cleaning is an inhumane slaughter method for a reptile and would not pass any current welfare standard, quite apart from the legal question.
- The gall bagRemoving the gall bladder intact was the hinge of old terrapin cookery; a ruptured one made the whole pan bitter and unusable. Period cooks also discarded the head, claws and the sand-filled intestine, which this text abbreviates to "the entrails" and assumes the reader already knows.
- Cook, chill, hold, reheatThe meat is boiled for an hour, chilled in the ice box for an unspecified period, then merely warmed through with butter in a chafing dish at table. The holding and gentle reheating are uncontrolled, and this is not a safe way to treat cooked meat today.
- If you want the dishFarmed freshwater turtle and snapping turtle are sold legally in some markets, but they are not the same animal and should be handled with a current, tested recipe rather than this one.
Terrapin was a great luxury of Chesapeake and Philadelphia cooking in the second half of the nineteenth century, served at club dinners and hotel breakfasts and commanding very high prices. Many period treatments finished the meat with cream, egg yolk and a good deal of Madeira or sherry, and the closing sentence here, insisting that no wine is used or served, sets this version against that practice. The fashion outran its supply: by the 1920s the wild diamondback terrapin was scarce enough that federal and state hatchery work was underway, and the dish disappeared from menus not from changing taste alone but for want of terrapin.