Home › Entrees › Lobster Cutlets
Lobster Cutlets
2 cups chopped lobster meat 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Few gratings nutmeg 1 teaspoon lemon juice Yolk 1 egg 1 teaspoon finely chopped parsley 1 cup Thick White Sauce Mix ingredients in order given, and cool. Shape in form of cutlets, crumb, and fry same as croquettes. Make a cut at small end of each cutlet, and insert in each the tip end of a small claw. Stack around a mound of parsley. Serve with Sauce Tartare.
A croquette mixture in cutlet shape, bound with a stiff white sauce and given a claw tip for a handle. The success of the dish rests almost entirely on how thick the binding sauce is and how cold the mixture gets before shaping.
- Thick White SauceThis is a panada, not a pouring sauce: about 4 tablespoons butter and 4 tablespoons flour cooked together, then 1 cup milk, simmered until it pulls away from the pan in a mass. A thinner sauce will not hold the cutlet together in the fat.
- Chill hard"cool" here means chilling the mixture until it is firm enough to shape; a couple of hours in the refrigerator, or overnight, does it. A warm mixture spreads in the pan and bursts its crust.
- Crumb, and fry same as croquettesThe standard sequence is dry crumbs, then beaten egg thinned with a spoonful of water, then crumbs again; letting the coated cutlets rest and dry before frying helps set the coating.
- Fat temperatureDeep fat at 375-390F, which the period books tested by browning a bread cube in 40 seconds. Fry two or three at a time so the temperature does not crash; they need only 2 to 3 minutes, as everything in them is already cooked.
- The lobsterTwo cups of chopped meat is roughly the yield of two 1 1/4 lb lobsters, and cooking them yourself gives you the small claws the recipe calls for. Cook the claw tips with the lobster and reserve them; they are decoration only.
- Egg yolkThe raw yolk enriches and binds, and largely cooks during the frying, though a short fry from cold will not necessarily bring the centre far past warm. Add it to the sauce once the sauce has cooled somewhat, or it will scramble in streaks.
- YieldAbout eight cutlets, serving four as an entree course. Sauce Tartare is mayonnaise with chopped capers, pickles or olives, and parsley.
Cutlet-shaped croquettes were a fixture of the American and English entree course from the 1880s through the 1920s, and the trick of setting a small claw tip into the narrow end to imitate the bone of a lamb or veal cutlet appears in cookery school manuals of the period. The point was visual wit at the table: a made dish of chopped, sauced meat, presented in the silhouette of a chop. The technique itself descends from the French croquette, built on a panada stiff enough to be moulded. Serving it stacked around a mound of parsley with tartare sauce is straightforwardly of its period, when garnish and arrangement carried as much weight in an entree as flavour.