Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [76]
The normal accompaniment for terrapin soup was roasted canvasback ducks from the Chesapeake; canvasbacks headed up the game course as far away as the Whittier dinner in Boston, which probably made Twain happy. He once wrote a letter to Livy describing a “marvel” of a dinner he’d eaten in New York, beginning with individual quarts of champagne in a silver cooler. After a first course of “very small raw oysters—just that moment opened, and swimming in their own sea water,” had come terrapin stew “in dainty little covered pots, with curious little gold-&-silver terrapin spoons from Tiffany’s. Sublime,” he wrote. “There never was such terrapin before. It was unspeakable.” Finally, “before each man was set an entire canvass-back duck, red hot from the oven, & on his plate was laid a carving knife and fork.—he must do his own carving. These ducks were just simply divine. So ended the dinner. . . . Five skeletons represented the ducks; 6 empty bottles represented the champagne.”
The best canvasbacks, as Twain noted on his menu, were from Baltimore, or at least the Chesapeake—by fall these had grown so fat on wild celery that they were said to include their own gravy. “There is no need to prepare a gravy,” went typical instructions. “Immediately they are cut they will fill the dish with the richest gravy that ever was tasted.” This regional quality is why they were so often paired with terrapin; McAllister said that “terrapin is with us as national a dish as canvasback,” while in 1839 Frederick Marryat ate them together so frequently that he thought it natural to compare them directly, writing that “the great delicacies in America are the terrapin, and the canvas-back ducks. To like the former I consider rather an acquired taste, but the canvas-back duck is certainly well worthy of its reputation.” He was unusual in strongly preferring one over the other; both delicacies, the New York Times said in 1888, were “necessary to a very swell dinner.”
However it was prepared, whatever the accompaniments, terrapin meat was usually described as elevated, even delicate. Joseph Mitchell compared it to baby mushrooms. A recent Baltimore Sun article dissented considerably, saying that the word most often applied lately is “gamy”—and that it was even a bit like muskrat. This, I’d suggest, was written by someone who has never eaten muskrat—or else descriptions of tasty turtle soup were monstrous put-ons, massive acts of collective self-delusion. Besides, in Twain’s day cooks agreed that the best analogue to terrapin was calf’s head; recipes for mock turtle soup almost always began with simmering a head until the cheeks and tongue fall apart.
A lot of terrapin recipes sound delicious. Still, I can’t get as enthusiastic about terrapin soup as about Twain’s other foods, for the simple reason that before any cooking could begin, the terrapin had to be dead. Obviously that’s true for the raccoons, trout, prairie chickens, and so on. The difference is that, like lobster today, terrapins were almost always sold live; you killed them in the kitchen.
After my semitough talk about killing lobsters resolutely and without regret, the descriptions of killing turtles remind me why I should never talk tough. Terrapins are cute. I wish terrapins well. And though, in an era of truly abundant terrapin, I can imagine killing one with a single swift stroke of the cleaver, nearly every recipe begins with something along the lines of “plunge the live turtle into boiling water.” That I don’t think I could do, or ask to have done on my behalf. And it strikes me that the necessity of killing and cleaning a turtle on the spot was probably a big part of its elite appeal; cooking terrapin was messy and difficult, but not so much if you had a full-time kitchen staff. (Suddenly the