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Lobster Scallops
Cut a cooked lobster into very small pieces, and put it into a basin with half an ounce of flour, two ounces of butter, a gill of milk, a pinch of cayenne, a tea-spoonful of anchovy sauce, and a little minced parsley. Then squeeze a dash of lemon juice over, fill some buttered scallop shells with the mixture, sprinkle with bread-crumbs, put a little butter on top of each, and bake for ten minutes in a moderate oven.
A late-Victorian way of stretching one lobster across four plates. The method as printed assumes you know that the flour, butter and milk are meant to become a sauce; taken literally, you would be baking raw flour.
- Make the sauce firstMelt the 2 oz butter, stir in the ½ oz flour, cook a minute, then whisk in the gill of milk to a thick binding sauce before folding in the lobster and seasonings. Ten minutes in the oven will not cook out raw flour, and the mixture will taste pasty if you simply stir everything cold in a basin.
- A gillFive fluid ounces in a British book of this date, so a scant ⅔ cup. Half an ounce of flour to that much milk gives a fairly thick binding sauce, which is what you want for something that has to sit in a shell.
- Moderate ovenAbout 350F/175C, though a Victorian 'moderate' oven covers roughly 325-375F. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so the ten minutes is only to heat through and set the crumbs; finish a minute under a hot grill if you want colour.
- Anchovy sauceThe bottled Victorian condiment, closest today to anchovy essence or Gentleman's Relish. A teaspoon of anchovy paste, or two mashed fillets, does the same job — it is there for salt and depth, not fishiness.
- Scallop shellsDeep scallop shells were standard kitchen equipment then and are still sold as ovenware. Ramekins or small gratin dishes work identically; butter them well, as the mixture sticks.
- The lobsterA cooked 1½–2 lb lobster yields roughly 5–8 oz of picked meat, enough to fill a few shells. Include the coral and the green tomalley if the lobster has them — period cookery books often pounded them into a sauce for colour and flavour, though this recipe does not mention them.
- SeasoningCayenne, lemon and anchovy are all salty or sharp, so taste before adding any further salt. Add the lemon juice at the end, off the heat, or it can curdle the milk sauce.
Serving minced shellfish baked back in its own or a borrowed shell is much older than this book — the French *coquille* and the English "scallop" both name the mollusc and, by extension, its shell used as a dish, and by the nineteenth century "scalloped" had come to describe any dish of chopped food bound in sauce and crumbed on top, whether or not a shell was involved. Cassell's places this among lobster's many secondary uses. The anchovy sauce is a marker of the period: bottled anchovy essence, along with mushroom ketchup and Worcestershire, was the standard Victorian shortcut to savoury depth.