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LOBSTER (au Gratin)
Take all the meat out of two large lobsters (putting aside the coral and spawn, which can be used for garnishing), mince it very fine, then pound it in a mortar with a wine-glassful of cream, two ounces of butter, and cayenne pepper and salt to taste. When thoroughly smooth fill the head and tail shells with the mixture, cover over with fine bread-crumbs, then small pieces of butter, and heat in a moderate oven for fifteen minutes, adding a little butter from time to time. Arrange artistically on a serviette on a silver dish, sprinkle a little coral over, and garnish with parsley.
A Victorian dressed-lobster dish that assumes cooked lobsters and a cook with a marble mortar. The whole thing hinges on the pounding: the mixture should be smooth and paste-like, not a chunky salad, or it will not hold in the shell.
- The lobsters are already cookedCassell's assumes you begin with boiled lobsters, as the meat is only heated through for fifteen minutes. The recipe gives no weights; two large lobsters of 1 1/2 to 2 lb apiece would yield perhaps 3/4 to 1 lb of picked meat in total.
- Wine-glassfulIn late-Victorian usage a wine-glass is about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. Add it gradually while working the meat; too much at once and the filling will slump out of the shells.
- Moderate oven350F. Fifteen minutes is only enough to heat cooked meat and set the crumbs. If the top has not coloured, finish it for a minute or two under the broiler rather than leaving it longer in the oven, which dries the lobster out.
- Coral and spawnThe coral is the roe of a hen lobster, bright red once cooked; the greenish tomalley is the liver. The recipe puts aside both coral and spawn for garnishing, though only coral is sprinkled over at the end; drying it and rubbing it through a sieve to a fine powder is the usual way to prepare it for sprinkling, but the recipe does not say so. Not every lobster will have any.
- Mortar, or notA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but pulse rather than run it, and add the cream and softened butter in stages. Overworked lobster turns pasty and loses its texture entirely.
- The shellsSplit the body and tail shells lengthwise, scrub them out and dry them well before filling. The head shells in particular need the stomach sac and gills removed.
- Basting"Adding a little butter from time to time" means dotting more butter on the crumbs as they absorb what is there. Clarified butter browns more evenly and is less likely to catch.
- ServingThe folded napkin on a silver dish was conventional Victorian presentation, and would also help keep the shells from sliding. Two lobsters filled this way would serve about four as a first course, two as a light main.
Dishes "au gratin" in nineteenth-century English cookery meant almost anything finished with breadcrumbs and butter and browned; cheese, often associated with the phrase today, is absent here. Serving the meat back in its own shell was a standard piece of Victorian table theatre, of a piece with the dressed crab and the scallop served in its deep valve, and Cassell's insistence on arranging the shells "artistically" on a napkin with a dusting of coral tells you the dish was judged as much by appearance as by flavour. Lobster appears to have been more widely available then than it later became in Britain: it was landed in quantity around the Scottish and Cornish coasts and reached inland cities by rail, and Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery treats it in many forms, potted, curried, in cutlets and in sauces.