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Broiled Lobsters
Kill lobsters by cutting tails off with one stroke of the knife, just where they join the body. With another clean cut divide each lengthwise into 2 equal parts, shell and all. Take out coral, the one long intestine and stomach. Crack claws with a hammer. Put within a Criscoed broiler, split side downward, and broil over fire. As soon as juice begins to run freely withdraw long enough to baste liberally with melted Crisco, and return to fire, turning often to keep in juices. Cook about 10 minutes on split or flesh side, and 8 upon other. Have ready sauce made by rubbing 2 tablespoons Crisco to cream with lemon juice and finely-minced parsley, adding little red pepper, and baste lobsters with this while hissing hot. Serve half lobster to each guest.
A live-lobster recipe from a Crisco promotional cookbook, written for a wire broiler held over coals rather than an oven element. A few things need translating before it works on modern equipment.
- Dispatching the lobsterCutting off the tail first is not how it is done now. Chill the lobster in the freezer for 15-20 minutes to sedate it, then drive the point of a heavy knife straight down through the head behind the eyes and bring the blade forward. This is the usual modern method, though a lobster's nervous system is a chain of ganglia rather than a single brain, so one cut is not necessarily instant. Split lengthwise from there.
- "Criscoed broiler"This means a hinged wire grill basket, greased, clamped over the lobster and set on a grate above live coals -- not the overhead broiler of a modern oven. A charcoal or gas grill with the halves cut side down over direct heat reproduces it; under an oven broiler, cook cut side up the whole time and skip the turning.
- CriscoIntroduced a few years before this book and the reason the book exists. Melted butter, clarified butter or a neutral oil all baste better and taste better here; the finishing sauce in particular is far more at home as creamed butter.
- Coral and tomalleyThe "coral" is the roe of a female lobster, and the green tomalley is the digestive gland. This recipe simply directs that the coral be taken out and says nothing of the tomalley, though both turn up worked into sauces in other cookery of the period. Current advisories are to discard tomalley, which concentrates contaminants.
- The timings run longTen minutes on the flesh side plus eight on the shell will overcook a modern 1 to 1.5 lb lobster into cotton. Figure 5-6 minutes cut side down and another 3-4 on the shell, pulling the meat at about 135-140F at the thickest part of the tail.
- The one thing that mattersBaste constantly and keep the split side facing the fire only briefly. All the sweetness is in the juice that pools in the shell; once it has boiled away the tail meat dries out within a minute or two.
- "Little red pepper"Cayenne, used as a pinch rather than a measure. Two tablespoons of fat creamed with the juice of half a lemon, a tablespoon of minced parsley and a pinch of cayenne is a workable reading.
- YieldHalf a lobster per person, as written, suits a dinner with several courses. As a main course, allow a whole 1.25 lb lobster each.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to an already well-established genre: the manufacturer's cookbook, published by Procter & Gamble to persuade American cooks that a hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter and lard in every dish, broiled lobster included. The recipes were competent -- they were written by a professional, Marion Harris Neil -- but every one of them names the product, often more than once, and the basting-and-finishing routine here exists largely to get Crisco onto the plate twice. Lobster was a reasonable choice for such a book because it was still cheap and plentiful on the North Atlantic coast; its transformation from a food generally associated with the poor and, by tradition at least, with prison rations into a luxury item was underway but not complete.