Home › Fish › Stuffed Lobster a la Bechamel
Stuffed Lobster a la Bechamel
2 lb. lobster 1 1/2 cups milk Bit of bay leaf 3 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Slight grating nutmeg 1 teaspoon chopped parsley 1 teaspoon lemon juice Yolks 2 eggs 1/2 cup buttered crumbs Remove lobster meat from shell and cut in dice. Scald milk with bay leaf, remove bay leaf and make a white sauce of butter, flour, and milk; add salt, cayenne, nutmeg, parsley, yolks of eggs slightly beaten, and lemon juice. Add lobster dice, refill shells, cover with buttered crumbs, and bake until crumbs are brown. One-half chicken stock and one-half cream may be used for sauce if a richer dish is desired.
A standard béchamel bound with egg yolks, folded through lobster and returned to the shells to gratinate. The recipe assumes the cook already knows to start with a boiled lobster.
- Start with cooked lobsterThe instruction to remove the meat from the shell presupposes a lobster already boiled or steamed and cooled. A 2 lb lobster yields roughly 8 oz of picked meat; the same weight of picked meat from a larger lobster works equally well, though you then need another vessel to bake it in.
- Save the shellsSplit the body shells lengthwise, clean them, and keep the halves intact for filling. Ramekins or small gratin dishes serve the same purpose if the shells break up.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. Bake at 400F, high on the rack, for 10-15 minutes, until the crumbs colour. The filling is already cooked, so the oven is only browning the top.
- Buttered crumbsHalf a cup of fresh soft breadcrumbs tossed with about a tablespoon or so of melted butter until each crumb is coated. Dry packaged crumbs absorb less butter and brown faster; watch them.
- The egg yolksTake the white sauce off the heat before the beaten yolks go in, and stir them through a spoonful of the hot sauce first. Added straight to a simmering pan they curdle and the sauce goes grainy.
- Lemon juice lastAcid added to a hot milk sauce before it has thickened can cause it to separate. Stir it in at the end, after the yolks, with the pan off the flame.
- Scalding the milkBring the milk with the bay leaf just to the point where bubbles form at the edge, then let it stand a few minutes to infuse before straining out the leaf. Boiling it hard gains nothing.
- SeasoningA few grains of cayenne is a light pinch, and the nutmeg is a scrape rather than a measure. Both are meant to sharpen the sauce, not to be identifiable.
- YieldTwo generous shells, enough for two as a main course or four as a first course.