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Lobster Chowder
2 lb. lobster 4 cups milk 3 tablespoons butter 1 slice onion 2 common crackers, finely pounded 1 cup cold water Salt Paprika or cayenne Remove meat from lobster shell and cut in small dice. Cream two tablespoons butter, add liver of lobster (green part) and crackers; scald milk with onion, remove onion, and add milk to mixture. Cook body bones ten minutes in cold water to cover, strain, and add to mixture with lobster dice. Season with salt and paprika.
A milk-based chowder thickened with pounded crackers rather than flour, in the New England style. The recipe assumes a lobster already boiled and picked, and it assumes you know not to let dairy come to a boil.
- Start with a cooked lobsterThe instruction to remove the meat from the shell presumes a whole 2 lb lobster already boiled or steamed. Buy it cooked or boil it 12-14 minutes, then pick the meat and reserve the body and small shell pieces for the ten-minute stock.
- Never let it boilOnce the scalded milk and the cracker-butter paste are combined, keep the pot below a simmer. Milk held at a boil with lobster shell stock in it will curdle and the chowder will turn grainy.
- Common crackersBoston common crackers were a dry, thick, nearly unsalted round cracker used as a thickener. Two of them pounded fine give something on the order of 1/3 to 1/2 cup of crumbs; unsalted saltines or oyster crackers crushed to the same volume are the nearest substitute, though salted versions will change how much salt the pot needs.
- The green partThat is the tomalley, the lobster's liver, and creaming it with butter is what gives this chowder much of its colour and depth. Current advice from food-safety agencies is to skip tomalley, since contaminants and marine toxins concentrate there; leaving it out costs flavour but nothing structural.
- "Body bones"Meaning the carcass, the thin shell plates and leg shells. Simmer them in the cup of cold water for the full ten minutes, then strain through a fine sieve so no shell splinters reach the pot.
- The third tablespoon of butterOnly two of the three tablespoons are accounted for in the method. The remaining one can be stirred in off the heat at the end; the recipe does not say where it goes.
- SeasoningThe recipe offers paprika or cayenne; paprika here works for colour as much as heat, while cayenne needs a much lighter hand. Salt to taste, as the crackers and milk both mute it.
- YieldFour cups of milk plus the lobster gives four moderate first-course servings, or two suppers. Serve hot, with more crackers at the table.
Chowder in nineteenth-century New England was defined less by its contents than by its structure: fish or shellfish, salt pork or butter, and hard crackers, moistened with milk or water. Crackers were the thickener in this older style, and the Boston common cracker was a dry, hard cracker that held its shape in liquid and could also be pounded down as it is here. Lobster was abundant and comparatively cheap along parts of the coast for much of the century, though by 1900 it was rising in price and status. Cookery books of this school (the household and cooking-school manuals that came out of Boston around 1900) often told cooks to simmer the picked shell for a short stock, as here. Creaming the tomalley into butter is the same trick used in lobster butter and lobster bisque.