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Lobster Cream
Chop the meat of a two-pound lobster fine. Cook half a cup of stale bread crumbs in half a cup of milk for ten minutes. Add to this a fourth of a cup of cream, two teaspoons of anchovy essence, half a teaspoon of salt, a few grains of cayenne and the whites of three eggs beaten stiff. Turn into a buttered oval mold, set in a pan of hot water, cover the top of the dish with buttered paper and bake twenty minutes in a moderate oven.-See Page XXVII.
A baked lobster mousseline in the classic mold-in-a-water-bath style. The whole thing hangs on the egg whites: fold them in, do not stir, or the mixture collapses and bakes dense.
- How much lobsterA two-pound lobster yields roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups of picked meat, about 8 ounces. Buying a cooked lobster or an equivalent weight of cooked claw and knuckle meat gives the same result.
- Moderate ovenRead this as roughly 350-375F. In a water bath the custard sets gently; 20 minutes suits a shallow mold of about 3 to 4 cups, longer if the mixture is deeper than an inch and a half.
- Anchovy essenceA thin, salty Victorian bottled seasoning, now hard to find. Anchovy paste is the closest thing: use about a teaspoon and a half, since it is more concentrated, and taste before adding the full half teaspoon of salt.
- Stale bread crumbsSoft crumbs from day-old bread, not dry packaged crumbs, which will drink far more milk. Cooking them in milk for ten minutes makes a panade; stir it so it does not catch, and let it cool to warm before the egg whites go in.
- Buttered paperParchment cut to fit, buttered side down, or foil. It keeps the surface from drying and browning; it is not a seal, so leave it loose.
- The water bathHot water should come halfway up the mold. Setting the pan on a folded towel steadies it and keeps the bottom from overheating.
- DonenessA knife slipped into the center comes out clean and the mixture feels set but springy, around 170F. Baked past that it weeps liquid and turns spongy.
- Yield and servingFour small servings as a first course. Unmold onto a warm platter and serve with a cream, egg or shrimp sauce; the mixture is deliberately mild and wants one.
Baked and steamed fish "creams" were a fixture of turn-of-the-century American and English cookery, the household version of the French mousseline: pounded or finely chopped fish bound with a bread panade, enriched with cream and lightened with beaten whites, then set in a mold over water. The technique let a cook stretch a single expensive lobster into a dish for a table of four and present it in a shape, which mattered in an era when molded food signaled care. Anchovy essence, called for here in place of any strong flavor of its own, was a standard pantry bottle in the 1880s and 90s and turns up throughout the fish chapters of books of this period, used much as Worcestershire or fish sauce is now. The cross-reference to a numbered page reflects the book's habit of sending readers elsewhere rather than repeating an instruction.