Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [71]
So to me it seems totally appropriate (in a way, almost inevitable) that Mark Twain, of Hannibal, Missouri, ate stewed terrapin soup in Boston on the night he tried to join the ranks of America’s literary elite—the night that proved the most humiliating of his life.
TERRAPIN CLEAR SOUP
Save the water used in boiling the terrapin, and after they are dressed put their shells, broken up, into the water, and boil them for six hours; then add enough stock of bouillon or consommé to doubly cover them, and again boil them until they begin to soften. After that cool and clarify the broth thus made, season with salt, cayenne, and Madeira, and serve it clear.
—JULIET CORSON, Practical American Cookery and Household Management, 1886
Diamondback terrapins rule the eastern salt marshes. They have no competition at all from other turtles, which lack salt glands; the ability to purge salt from moderately salty drinking water gives terrapins exclusive title to all the prime brackish wetland real estate. They’re carnivores and will eat almost anything else that swims or scrabbles: oysters, clams, snails, shrimp, mussels, barnacles, fish. They’ll eat a crab’s leg, tearing it off from behind and fleeing from the claws. In turn, crabs raid their nests, as do foxes, crows, and eagles; the turtles are themselves eaten by raccoons.
And by men. “Terrapin” is a corruption of the Algonquin torope, the Abenaki turepe, and the Delaware turpen, all of which mean “edible turtle”; Native Americans, and later white colonists and enslaved Africans, defined the animal by its value as food. Terrapins have been trapped, snatched up barehanded, rutted out from the mud, caught by children with hand nets, and unceremoniously dredged from their winter hiding spots. North Carolinians tracked nesting terrapins with dogs or set fire to marsh grasses in winter in hopes the warmth would tempt them from hibernation (the New York Times called both methods “barbaric”). More often men waded chest-deep in the autumn Chesapeake, probing the muddy bottom with pronged poles, hoping to prod a hibernating turtle’s shell.
The same 1880 Washington Post article that declared terrapin essential to pretentious dinners also described the most “primitive” style of cooking one: laying it on its back, alive, among the coals or in a hot oven. After it was cooked, the cook removed the gall bag and ate the rest directly from the shell, possibly with a dressing of sherry and butter. Cooking terrapin this way (without the dressing, of course) was common among Chesapeake tribes such as the Delaware, who buried turtles alive in hot embers.
Terrapin stew also has deep roots among African Americans, such as those who made Louisiana’s soupe à la tortue for French and Spanish Creole planters, or Baltimore’s best French-trained turtle cooks (many had fled to the city from the Haitian Revolution). In 1880 the New York Times claimed that “there is an art about making terrapin soup which a professional cook has to acquire, but which seems to come natural to a Virginian negro” and a decade later praised “the terrapin dressed by the great original bandana-crowned negro cook.” Meanwhile, New York socialite and dedicated snob Ward McAllister wrote that no Frenchman could make the soup, which “require[d] the native born culinary genius of the African.” Putting aside “bandana-crowned” and that kind of garbage, terrapin was clearly something unusual: a dish with African-American origins that were openly acknowledged by the Victorian upper class.
That’s not to say that wealthy whites were giving all the credit to poor or enslaved African Americans for inventing their beloved terrapin soup. It was common, for instance, to say that the turtles were “given” or “fed to” slaves—a typical example is the story that slaves once “raised their voices in loud complaint