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Lobster Patties
Cut one pint of lobsters into small pieces, half a pint of white sauce, very little mustard, a small pinch of cayenne. Put on the fire and stir together until hot. Place in shells and serve.
A three-line chafing-dish filling that depends entirely on not overcooking the lobster. The original assumes you already have white sauce and baked pastry shells on hand.
- Heat it, do not cook itThe lobster is already cooked; "stir together until hot" means just that. Bring the sauce to a bare simmer, fold the meat in, and take it off the heat within a minute or two, or the flesh turns fibrous and squeaky.
- "Shells" means pastryFor a dish called patties, the shells are baked puff-pastry patty shells (vol-au-vent cases) or small tartlet shells, not lobster carapaces. Frozen puff pastry shells work; bake them before filling and fill at the last moment so the base stays crisp.
- A pint of lobsterMeasured by volume in the cup, not weight: a pint of cut meat is roughly 10 to 12 oz, which will take two or three 1 1/4 lb lobsters, or an equivalent weight of tail meat.
- Half a pint of white sauceOne cup of medium béchamel — about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk or a mix of milk and lobster or fish stock. It should coat a spoon thickly; a thin sauce will soak the pastry.
- Mustard and cayenne"Very little" mustard is about 1/4 teaspoon of dry mustard, whisked into the sauce rather than added at the end so it does not stay raw and gritty. Salt is not mentioned but is needed, and a squeeze of lemon lifts the whole thing.
- YieldDepending on the size of the shells, roughly eight to twelve, enough for four as a first course or a light lunch dish.
- If you use canned or frozen lobsterDrain it well and pat it dry, or the liquid it releases will thin the sauce in the pan. Taste before salting, since packed lobster is often already salted.
"Patties" here is the older English sense of the word — small pastry cases with a savoury filling, from the French pâté, of which the modern flat-cake-of-meat sense is a later development of the same word. Lobster patties appear in English and American cookbooks throughout the nineteenth century as a standard supper and ball-supper dish, part of the same family as lobster newburg, lobster cutlets and the croquettes that surround this entry. They turn up often in turn-of-the-century household books, and much of the lobster arrived in tins: canned lobster was a major American and Canadian export by the 1880s, which is why a recipe like this assumes cooked meat measured out by the pint rather than a live animal in the pot. The formula is essentially creamed shellfish, and the same page of white sauce, mustard and cayenne would have served equally for chicken, sweetbreads or oysters.