Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Terrapin

A stew of terrapin meat, blood, and cream, flavored with spices and fortified with brandy and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Brandy and sherry are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,209 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Stewed Terrapin

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the terrapins

  1. Plunge the live terrapins into boiling water until the sides and lower shell begin to crack, about 1 hour.

  2. Remove the terrapins and let them cool.

  3. Take off the shell and outer skin, saving as much blood as possible.

  4. Remove the gall immediately to avoid bitterness.

  5. Cut the liver and terrapin into small pieces.

Make the stew

  1. Add the saved blood and juice, along with ½ cup of water, and sprinkle flour over the mixture in a stew-pan.

  2. Stew slowly for 10 minutes, adding salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper, and mace.

  3. Stir in ⅓ cup of brandy and ½ cup of sherry wine.

  4. Let it simmer gently.

  5. About 10 minutes before serving, add ½ pint of rich cream and ½ pound of sweet butter, mixing in flour to prevent boiling.

  6. Peel the eggs and add them whole.

  7. If no eggs are present, use hard-boiled egg yolks.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Brandy + sherrytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,209 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Brandy + winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,427 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Wine + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Terrapins
Provide the main meat and liver, which give the stew its body and rich flavour.
Flour
Thickens the stew's liquid so it becomes smooth and clings to the meat.
Sweet butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the finished stew a silky mouthfeel.
Rich cream
Adds richness and body, softening the stew's flavour and texture.
Sherry wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the stew.

The step that matters

Mixing in flour before adding the cream and butter. Flour stabilises the dairy and fat so the cream does not curdle or separate when the stew approaches boiling.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, pepper, brandy, sherry, wine, cream, butter):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, pepper, brandy, sherry, wine, cream, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes