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Fricassee of Lobster and Mushrooms
2 lb. lobster 1/4 cup butter 3/4 lb. mushrooms Few drops onion juice 1/4 cup flour 1 1/2 cups milk Salt Paprika 2 tablespoons Sherry wine Remove lobster meat from shell and cut in strips. Cook butter with mushrooms broken in pieces and onion juice three minutes; add flour, and pour on gradually milk. Add lobster meat, season with salt and paprika, and, as soon as lobster is heated, add wine. Remove to serving dish, and garnish with puff paste or toast points and parsley.
A creamed lobster in the Boston cooking-school manner: a butter-and-flour sauce built over mushrooms, finished with sherry and served on pastry or toast. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes once the lobster is picked.
- Heat the lobster, do not cook itThe instruction "as soon as lobster is heated" is the hinge. The meat goes in already cooked and needs only to warm through in the sauce, a minute or two; held at a simmer it turns fibrous and squeaks against the teeth.
- What "2 lb. lobster" meansA two-pound lobster in the shell, boiled or steamed, yields roughly 6 to 8 oz of picked meat. Buying cooked picked meat, about half a pound will do and you can skip the shelling.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine rasp and press the pulp in a cloth or sieve; a few drops is all that is wanted. A very small amount of finely grated shallot achieves the same effect without the pulp.
- MushroomsThree-quarters of a pound is generous against half a pound of lobster, and it is meant to be. Ordinary cultivated white or cremini mushrooms are the right thing; break rather than slice them, as written, so they stay in visible pieces.
- Sauce consistencyEqual quarter-cups of butter and flour to 1 1/2 cups milk gives a thick, spoon-coating sauce. Mushrooms release water as they cook, which thins it; if it still stands up too stiffly, loosen with a little more milk before the lobster goes in.
- The sherryTwo tablespoons of a dry or medium sherry, added off the direct heat at the end. Boiling it away defeats the purpose "cooking sherry" is salted and will throw the seasoning off.
- Puff paste pointsThe recipe gives no oven directions; bake rounds or triangles of puff pastry in a hot oven, around 400-425F, until risen and dry, then split them for a base. Frozen all-butter puff pastry is an honest substitute; buttered toast cut into triangles is the plainer option the recipe also allows.
- YieldServes three as a main course or four as a first course. It does not hold or reheat well the lobster suffers on the second pass.
Fricassee properly names a French method in which meat is cooked gently in fat and then finished in a pale sauce rather than browned, and by the late nineteenth century American cookbooks had stretched the word to cover almost any creamed dish of cut-up flesh. Lobster in a milk-and-sherry sauce on pastry points belongs to the same family as lobster Newburg and the endless "creamed" fish dishes of the cooking-school era, when a well-made white sauce was considered the mark of a trained cook and canned or freshly boiled lobster was a reliable luxury on the Atlantic coast. The generous weight of mushrooms and the few drops of onion juice rather than chopped onion are both characteristic of that school's taste for flavour without visible coarseness.