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LOBSTER (a la Francaise)
Pick the flesh from a medium-sized fresh lobster, and cut it into small dice. Stir two table-spoonfuls of cream into a quarter of a pint of white stock, season with a little salt, cayenne, and pounded mace, put it into a stewpan with the lobster, and let it simmer very gently. Scrape the shell, and put it upon a dish with a border of puff paste round it. Pour the mixture into this, cover rather thickly with fine bread-crumbs, and brown it by holding over it an iron shovel which has been made red-hot. Time, to simmer five or six minutes. Probable cost of medium-sized lobster, 1s. 6d., when in full season. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian creamed lobster served back in its own shell, browned under a red-hot iron rather than in an oven. Almost everything translates directly; the two things worth watching are the heat on the lobster and what the book assumes you already did to it.
- The lobster is already cookedThe lobster is probably already cooked -- "fresh" here most likely means freshly boiled, as lobsters were usually sold ready-cooked. Pick the meat from a boiled lobster of about a pound or so; the five or six minutes of simmering reads as warming through in the sauce rather than cooking raw flesh.
- Do not let it boilThis is the hinge. Lobster meat tightens and turns cottony within a minute or two of a real simmer. Keep the pan at a bare tremble and pull it as soon as the dice are hot.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about 2/3 cup. With two tablespoons of cream that gives a thin, brothy sauce by modern taste; reduce it a little first if you want it to cling.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock. Fish stock or the strained liquor from boiling the lobster works better still and costs nothing.
- Pounded maceBlade mace crushed in a mortar. Ground mace from a jar is the same spice; use a generous pinch, as it fades fast on the shelf.
- The red-hot shovelThis is a domestic substitute for the salamander, a flat iron plate heated in the fire and held over food to glaze it. A broiler element at full heat, the dish set close beneath it for two or three minutes, does the same job.
- Puff paste borderA ribbon of puff pastry laid round the dish. It will not cook through under a broiler, so bake the border blind until crisp and golden before the filled shell goes in.
- YieldFour or five servings from one medium lobster is Victorian portioning at its thinnest. Treat it as a first course for four, or double the lobster for a main.
Cassell's returned to lobster repeatedly because the Victorian shellfish trade was substantial, and the crustacean sat somewhere between everyday and genteel. The "a la Francaise" tag signals the treatment rather than any specific French dish, a creamed, mace-scented mixture returned to the shell and glazed, in the manner of the restaurant kitchens whose vocabulary English cookery books were steadily borrowing. The red-hot iron shovel is the giveaway detail of the period: closed ovens browned poorly and unevenly, so a separate radiant heat was needed for gratins, and households without a proper salamander simply heated whatever flat iron came to hand. The name survives in the modern kitchen tool still sold as a salamander, and in the broiler that replaced both.