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LOBSTER (a l'Americaine)
Break the tails off one or two raw lobsters, cut the body shell in two, take off the legs, and cut the meat in equal-sized slices. Now put one or two spoonfuls of oil into a saucepan and heat it well; add the pieces of lobster, and brown over a clear fire. When half done add some carrots, onions, and garlic cut in small dice. Continue to brown a little, then moisten with a glass of white wine, season with pepper and salt and a pinch of cayenne; add a spoonful of tomato sauce and a bouquet garni, put the lid on the saucepan, and cook from ten to fifteen minutes, shaking the lobster occasionally. Add a small glass of brandy, and thin the sauce with a spoonful of stock. Take out the bouquet garni, and place the rest on a hot dish with the sauce poured over. Squeeze a few drops of lemon-juice over, and serve hot.
A straightforward sauté of raw lobster in oil, wine and brandy. The only real difficulty is the starting point: the recipe assumes you will be jointing a live or freshly killed lobster yourself.
- Start with raw lobsterThe dish depends on raw meat browning in hot oil, so pre-cooked or frozen-cooked lobster will not work — it turns woolly in the pan. Buy live lobsters and dispatch them immediately before cooking by driving a heavy knife through the head behind the eyes, then joint them as directed.
- Cut through the shell, not off it"Cut the meat in equal-sized slices" is usually taken to mean cutting the tail crosswise through the shell into rounds at the segment joints. The recipe itself speaks only of the tail, the body shell and the legs, not the claws. The shell is what flavours the sauce.
- VesselThe recipe calls for a saucepan with a lid; in practice a wide saut/pwith lid browns better, since the pieces need to sit in one layer rather than steam.
- A glass of wineThe book does not define its measures. A "glass" of wine in Victorian cookery is usually reckoned as a wineglassful, roughly 2 fl oz (60 ml); the "small glass" of brandy would be smaller, perhaps 1 fl oz (30 ml).
- SpoonfulsRead these as tablespoons: 1–2 tbsp oil, 1 tbsp tomato sauce, 1 tbsp stock. The tomato sauce meant here is a cooked, reduced tomato sauce, not ketchup; passata reduced a little, or tomato purée loosened with stock, is closer.
- TimingTen to fifteen minutes covered is generous by modern standards. Lobster tail meat is done in about 5–6 minutes of covered cooking once browned; claws take a little longer. Overcooked lobster shrinks and goes rubbery, so test the thickest tail piece early.
- Bouquet garniParsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string — tie it so you can find it again, since the instruction to remove it comes after the pan has been shaken repeatedly.
- The brandyAdded at the end to be warmed through rather than flamed. If you do ignite it, pull the pan off the heat first; a shallow pan of hot oil and spirit flares readily.
- YieldOne 1½ lb lobster serves one generously as a main course or two as a first course. Serve with bread or plain rice — the sauce is small in quantity and highly concentrated.
Lobster à l'américaine belongs to the great age of restaurant cookery in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century, and its name has been argued over ever since. It is often said to originate with Pierre Fraisse, a chef who had worked in the United States and who, by an anecdotal account, improvised the dish for late-arriving diners at his Paris restaurant sometime around the 1860s; the rival claim is that the name is a corruption of à l'armoricaine, Armorica being the old name for Brittany, whose lobsters and butter it uses. The Breton derivation is folk etymology as far as the documentary record goes, but the tomato, garlic and olive oil point south rather than north in any case. What the dish really asks the cook to learn is a method — the browning of raw shellfish in the shell, then deglazing with wine and spirit.