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Cutlets of Lobster or Crab
Mince very finely and pound in a mortar the flesh of a small hen lobster or a crab, and season it with salt and cayenne, whilst it is being pounded. Put one ounce of butter into a saucepan, and dredge very slowly into it one table-spoonful of flour; when smooth add a gill of water. Stir till the sauce boils, then add a little cream, a tea-spoonful of lobster butter (see LOBSTER BUTTER) and the pounded fish. Stir the mixture over the fire till it is quite hot, then take it out in a table-spoon, and lay it on a large dish. When quite cold, make it up in the shape of mutton cutlets, brush these over with beaten egg, strew finely-grated bread-crumbs over them, and fry them in boiling lard or dripping till lightly browned. Stick a little bit of claw into each cutlet, and garnish the dish with parsley. Time to fry, two or three minutes. Probable cost, one large lobster, 1s. 6d. to 2s. 6d. Sufficient for a large dish.
A croquette mixture set firm with a thick panada, shaped to look like little mutton chops. Nothing here is difficult, but the chilling step is what decides whether it holds together in the fat.
- Chill it hardThe instruction "when quite cold" is the hinge of the recipe. Spread the hot mixture in a shallow dish and refrigerate at least two hours, or overnight, until it is stiff enough to cut. Shaped while warm, the cutlets slump and burst in the fryer.
- A gillFive imperial fluid ounces, about 140 ml (a quarter of an imperial pint). With an ounce of butter and a tablespoon of flour this gives a moderately thick white sauce; the mixture stiffens further as the pounded fish is added and it cools.
- Hen lobsterA female lobster, prized for the coral (roe) that reddens the mixture. Sex is not marked at fish counters; buy about 8 oz of picked cooked lobster or white crab meat and accept a paler cutlet, or add a little tomato paste or paprika for colour.
- Lobster butterA compound butter made by pounding the shells and coral with butter, then straining. Cassell's cross-references its own entry. Omit it if you have none; the cutlets lose some depth but not much else.
- The flesh is already cookedNeither lobster nor crab is boiled in this recipe, so the meat must go in cooked. Heat the mixture only until it is hot through and thickened, a minute or two, or the shellfish turns stringy.
- Frying fatLard or dripping, as specified. Fry in fat deep enough to come well up the cutlets, or shallow-fry and turn, at roughly 350-375F in modern terms, for the two or three minutes given, until the crumb is light brown. The filling is already cooked, so colour is your only guide.
- Crumbs"Finely-grated bread-crumbs" means dry crumbs from stale bread, not the coarse fresh kind. Panko is coarser but fries cleanly if that is what you have.
- Yield"Sufficient for a large dish" is a Victorian sideboard portion. One lobster will give roughly eight to ten cutlets taken out by the tablespoon, serving about four as a first course, garnished with parsley as the recipe directs.
Shaping minced meat or fish into the outline of a chop, with a little bit of claw stuck into each cutlet, was a set piece of nineteenth-century kitchen work: the point was that a cheap or scrappy ingredient should arrive at table looking deliberate. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, an enormous alphabetical compendium aimed at household cooks, is full of these transformations, and it prices them 1s. 6d. to 2s. 6d. for the lobster because its readers were budgeting. The binding mixture is a thick panada, the same flour-butter-liquid base behind croquettes generally, and the technique is generally traced to French kitchen practice absorbed into English cookery over the course of the century. Lobster here is minced, pounded in a mortar and disguised as mutton.