Skip to main content
Main

Dressed Terrapin

A stew of terrapin claws seasoned with pepper, mace, nutmeg, butter, flour, sherry, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mace and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Dressed Terrapin

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the terrapin

  1. Boil the terrapin claws with salt.

  2. Remove the galls carefully and cut up the meat.

  3. Season the meat with pepper, mace, and nutmeg.

Make the stew

  1. In a stew-pan, combine the meat with its juice, butter, and flour.

  2. Stew until perfectly tender.

  3. Add sherry and beaten egg yolks before serving.

Serve

  1. Serve in a silver dish with a spirit lamp underneath.

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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

Butter and flour 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

Terrapin claws
Provide the main meat and body of the stew.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the stew.
Flour
Thickens the juices into a smooth, cohesive stew.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the finished stew.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the stew when added near the end.

The step that matters

Add sherry and beaten egg yolks before serving. Egg yolks thicken when heated, so they should be stirred in off the boil near serving. Overheating them can cause curdling and a grainy texture.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, nutmeg, butter, flour, sherry, egg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, nutmeg, butter, flour, sherry, egg. 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