Home › The Principles of Cookery › LOBSTER CUTLETS (another way)
LOBSTER CUTLETS (another way)
Put in a saucepan one table-spoonful of butter, and when it bubbles add one table-spoonful of flour. Cook, but not brown. Add slowly one cupful of hot cream and stir till smooth. Remove from the fire, add one tea-spoonful of salt, a dash of cayenne pepper, a slight dusting of nutmeg, the yolks of three hard-boiled eggs mashed fine, and the lobster meat cut in small bits. Be careful in mixing not to "muss" the meat. Spread half an inch thick on a platter to cool. When sufficiently cold, mould or cut into the form of chops. Dip in egg, roll in bread-crumbs, and fry quickly in hot fat. Remember that all the ingredients have been cooked once. These cutlets will mould better if the mixture is left for some time to harden, and are not harmed in the least by standing some hours after being formed and before being cooked. After frying, insert a small lobster claw at the narrow end of the cutlet. Drain on paper and serve on a napkin. Pass with them cardinal sauce, made as follows. Blend thoroughly together four table-spoonfuls of butter, one table-spoonful of finely chopped parsley, the juice of half a lemon and a dash of paprika. When ready to serve, add one tea-spoonful of lobster coral, dried and pounded to a powder. If this is not available, use a little fruit-red colour paste, till you get the desired tint.
A classic croquette worked into chop shapes: a stiff cream panada bound with hard-boiled yolk, chilled hard, breaded and fried. The recipe assumes cooked lobster and gives no quantity for it, so the proportions need judgement.
- The hinge is the chillingThe mixture must be cold and firm all the way through before you shape it, or the cutlets will burst in the fat. Half an inch thick on a platter, then at least three or four hours in the refrigerator; overnight is better, and the book is right that formed cutlets keep for hours.
- How much lobsterNo amount is given. One tablespoon each butter and flour with a cup of cream makes roughly a cupful of sauce, which will carry the meat of two 1 to 1 1/4 lb lobsters, perhaps 8 to 10 oz picked. That should give something like eight to ten cutlets, enough for four.
- Cook the roux properly"Cook, but not brown" means two to three minutes over moderate heat to lose the raw flour taste. Note that one tablespoon of flour to a cupful of cream gives only a lightly bound sauce; the mixture stiffens chiefly on chilling and with the mashed yolks, so the cooling stage matters more than the roux.
- SaltA full teaspoon in a cup of cream is heavy by current taste, particularly with salted butter and seawater-cooked lobster. Start with half and adjust before the mixture goes to chill.
- Frying"Hot fat" is not defined; no temperature is given, nor is deep fat specified. In practice fat around 375F suits these: all the ingredients are already cooked, as the text points out, so you are colouring the crumb and heating the centre, two to three minutes. Fat much below that lets the coating soak.
- Egg and crumbsBeat the egg with a teaspoon of water to loosen it, and use dry fine crumbs rather than fresh. A second coat of egg and crumbs on the chilled cutlets is cheap insurance against splitting.
- CoralThe coral is the roe of a female lobster, black-green when raw and scarlet when cooked. Dry the cooked roe in a very low oven until brittle, then pound it. Coral is often not to be had, since much lobster is sold already picked, so the substitution the recipe offers is frequently what happens; a few drops of modern gel food colouring do the same job as the fruit-red paste.
- Cardinal sauceWhat is described here is a compound butter, softened and served cold in a pat, not the classic cardinal sauce of béchamel, fish stock, cream and lobster butter. Make it a few hours ahead and keep it cool, or roll it in parchment and slice it.
- The claw garnishA single small claw tip pushed into the narrow end stands in for the chop bone. Reserve the pointed ends of the small claws when picking the meat and keep them dry until serving.
Shaping a bound mince into the outline of a lamb chop, complete with a bone of some kind at the narrow end, was one of the standard tricks of late nineteenth-century garnishing, and it turns up under "cutlets" for lobster, chicken, veal and even rice. The point was partly visual economy: a small quantity of expensive shellfish, stretched with a cream sauce, arrived at the table looking like a portion of meat. Compendious alphabetical cookery dictionaries of the period habitually gathered several versions of the same dish, which is the convention behind a heading like "another way". The name of the sauce is generally taken from the colour of a cardinal's robes, and in the wider French tradition cardinal sauce is a fish veloute or bechamel tinted and enriched with lobster butter; the version here is a simplified household compound butter carrying the same red, with the direction to fall back on colouring paste showing how often the coral was simply not to be had.