It’s almost hard to believe that the Sun published “My Favorite Recipe” in the same decade as Virginia Roeder’s “Fun with Sea Food.”
As much as I respect Roeder and her recipes, Helen Henry’s 1960s “My Favorite Recipe” column in the Sunday Sun was a welcome departure from Maryland’s long-unchanging recipe oeuvre.
Educator and librarian Mary Carter Smith shared a recipe for a peanut-coated chicken from Sierra Leone.
Carol Zapata, whose husband was a surgeon from Peru, offered up a recipe for “Cebiche” made using rockfish from the Chesapeake.
There was plenty of room for crab cakes, stuffed ham, and Thanksgiving roast goose, but the overall variety of recipes was far more representative of the dishes made in Maryland homes – and the variety we take for granted today.
If one wishes to emulate the classic flavor of terrapin, there are a few options. Perhaps the most famous(?) involves boiling a calves head. A 1900 article in the Baltimore Sun claimed that “Muskrats when served by the Eastern Shore cook as ‘mock terrapin’ will challenge the epicure to distinguish it from the real Chesapeake diamond-back.” Muskrats and calves-heads being hard to come by these days, the most appealing option uses cooked chicken. “Chicken terrapin” often appeared in housewives’ columns as a clever way to turn humble leftovers into something elevated nearly to the status of Maryland’s most famous gourmet dish.I actually suspect that Chicken Terrapin may have originated outside of Maryland. Why make an imitation of something that was so abundant? Chicken terrapin recipes appear in 19th-century newspapers in places like Kansas, Michigan, and Western Alabama.
