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Lobster Cutlets
a Two cups of lobster meat, two tablespoons of flour, one tablespoon of chopped parsley, three-fourths of cup of cream or milk, one tablespoon of butter, two eggs (yolks only).
Chop the fish into small pieces, using a silver knife, and adding the seasoning. Heat the milk to scalding, rub the butter and flour to a smooth paste, add this to the milk and stir until it thickens. Then add the beaten yolks of the eggs. Cook one minute and remove from the fire. Carefully add the lobster to this mixture and set aside to cool.
When cold form into balls, dip first into beaten egg and then in bread or cracker dust and fry in smoking hot fat. Drain upon soft brown paper and serve garnished with lemon.
This is a classic croquette mixture under another name: a very stiff cream sauce bound with egg yolk, folded around chopped lobster, chilled hard, then breaded and deep-fried. Everything depends on the chilling.
- Chill it properly"Set aside to cool" means several hours, ideally overnight, in the refrigerator. A mixture that is merely at room temperature will slump in the fryer and may burst its coating.
- Fat temperature"Smoking hot fat" reflects an era of lard and dripping with lower smoke points. Use 375F on a thermometer; at smoking point a modern neutral oil will brown the crumb long before the centre is hot.
- The silver knifeNineteenth-century cooks believed carbon steel blades discoloured fish and gave it a metallic taste, which was true of the unstainlessed steel of the day. Any modern stainless knife is fine.
- SeasoningThe recipe says "adding the seasoning" without naming it. Salt and white or cayenne pepper are the likely intent, and some period lobster recipes add a grating of nutmeg or a spoonful of sherry; season the sauce, taste it before the lobster goes in.
- How much lobsterTwo cups of picked meat is roughly 10-12 oz, which will take two or three 1 1/4-lb hard-shell lobsters. Claw and knuckle meat holds together better than tail in a croquette.
- Cook the flourRubbing butter and flour to a paste and stirring it into scalded milk gives a beurre manie thickening rather than a cooked roux. Let it bubble a minute or two before the yolks go in or the sauce tastes raw and pasty.
- ShapeDespite the name, the instruction is to form balls. If you want cutlets, press the chilled paste into small flat ovals or the traditional cone, and stick a bit of parsley stem in the narrow end for the mock chop bone.
- Draining and yield"Soft brown paper" is the grocer's bag; use paper towels or a rack. The quantity makes about a dozen croquettes, enough for four as a first course.
Lobster cutlets belong to the great age of the croquette, when American and English cookbooks turned nearly any cooked flesh into a bound, breaded, fried shape and named it for whatever it resembled: cutlets, chops, cromesquis, rissoles. Calling a ball of lobster and cream sauce a cutlet was a deliberate bit of table theatre borrowed from French service, and the parsley-stem "bone" was a familiar enough convention to pass without comment. Recipes like this one exist to stretch picked meat, which is fiddly to obtain, with milk, flour and egg. A make-ahead mixture that could be chilled in the morning and fried at the last minute suited a middle-class, servant-light kitchen exactly.