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Lobster Cutlets
Two lobsters, medium size; one cup of bread crumbs, one small onion chopped fine, a pint of butter, little mace, add little cayenne pepper and salt, form into cutlets, spread out, let cool and form them in shape of chops, dip in egg, and roll in bread crumbs, and fry in boiling fat.
A late-Victorian croquette in chop form, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew the method. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- The pint of butter is almost certainly a misprintA pint of butter to two lobsters and one cup of crumbs would not bind; it would be a puddle. Other period recipes for lobster cutlets generally use a few tablespoons of butter, often worked with flour and cream or stock into a thick panada. Treat the quantity as unusable as printed.
- Assume cooked lobster"Two lobsters, medium size" means boiled and picked. Two 1 1/4-lb lobsters yield roughly 8 to 10 oz of meat; substitute an equal weight of cooked lobster. The frying is too brief to cook raw shellfish through.
- The hinge is chilling"Spread out, let cool" is the whole success of the dish. Spread the mixture in a shallow pan no more than an inch deep and refrigerate until firm — two hours at least, overnight is better. Warm mixture will burst out of the crumb coat in the fat.
- MaceGround mace, the aril that covers the nutmeg seed, is milder and more floral than nutmeg itself and was commonly paired with shellfish in period cookery. A generous pinch for the whole batch; more reads as dessert spice.
- BreadingCrumb once, chill again for twenty minutes, and the coating stays put. Dried fine crumbs, not fresh, for the outer coat — fresh crumbs darken before the interior has heated.
- "Boiling fat"This means deep fat at 365–375F, not fat at a rolling boil. Fry in batches so the temperature does not crash; two to three minutes to a deep gold is enough since everything inside is already cooked.
- The chop shapeCutlets of this kind were often finished with a short piece of the lobster's small leg or a clipped macaroni pushed into the narrow end to mimic the bone of a lamb chop. Purely decorative, and skippable.
- YieldRoughly eight to ten cutlets, serving four as a main course with a lemon or tomato sauce, six as a first course.
Lobster cutlets belong to the long nineteenth-century fashion for serving one food in the shape of another — croquettes moulded as chops, veal dressed as game, cold salmon set in aspic moulds. The technique is French, from the kitchen practice of binding chopped cooked meat or fish in a stiff panada, and one of the routes by which it reached American household books was the cookery schools of the 1870s and 1880s. Its popularity here had a practical side: lobster was cheap and abundant on the northeastern coast for much of the century, and canned lobster made it available inland, so a dish that stretched picked meat with crumbs and butter and gave it the dignity of a cutlet suited a household that wanted a company dish without company expense.