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One Way to Prepare a Lobster
Put into a saucepan butter the size of a small egg, and one teaspoon of minced onion. When it has cooked, sprinkle in one teaspoon of flour, which cook also; then stir in one cup of the water in which the lobster was boiled, one cup of milk, one cup of strong veal or beef stock, pepper and salt. Add the meat of the boiled lobster, and when quite hot pour all in the center of a hot platter.
Decorate the dish with the lobster's head in the center, fried bread diamonds (croutons) around the outside; or with the abundant resources of lobster legs and trimmings. Mrs E. C. Gardner.
A creamed lobster in the plainest late-Victorian style: a quick roux, three liquids, and the meat of one boiled lobster warmed through. The proportions are worth reading closely before you commit.
- Butter the size of a small eggRoughly 2 tablespoons, though egg-size equivalents in nineteenth-century books run anywhere from about 2 tablespoons to 2 ounces. Fat was routinely measured by comparison to eggs, walnuts and hazelnuts.
- One teaspoon of flour to three cups of liquidThis will not thicken. The result is a lobster broth rather than a sauce, which may well have been the intent, but if you want something that coats the meat you need closer to 3 tablespoons each of flour and butter for the same three cups, and a longer cook on the liquid.
- The lobster water is saltThe lobster water may be salt -- Water a lobster was boiled in can carry a good deal of salt, depending on what went into the pot. Taste before you add the pepper and salt the recipe calls for, and season at the end, after the three liquids have combined.
- Warming, not cookingThe lobster is already cooked. "When quite hot" means two or three minutes in the hot liquid, no more. Lobster meat held at a simmer turns fibrous and squeaky very quickly.
- Veal or beef stockStrong veal stock was a standing item in a nineteenth-century kitchen and gave body that the single teaspoon of flour could not. A good unsalted chicken stock is the closest modern substitute; a heavy beef stock will bully the lobster.
- Fried bread diamondsCroutons cut on the diagonal from crustless white bread and fried in butter until golden. Cut them before frying, not after, and drain them so they stay crisp against the wet dish.
- The head as garnishThe carapace of the boiled lobster, rinsed and set in the middle of the platter. Purely decorative, and a common garnish of the period; skip it without loss.
- YieldOne boiled lobster of 1 1/2 to 2 lb in three cups of liquid serves two generously as a main course, or four in soup plates as a first course.
The signed attribution points to a compilation that drew on contributions from readers and from women known to its editors, which is why this entry carries a name rather than standing anonymous, and why it reads as one household's habit rather than a fixed formula. The dish itself belongs to a broad American family of creamed lobster preparations alongside lobster Newburg and lobster a la king, all of them ways to stretch a single boiled lobster across a table with milk, stock and butter. The instruction to build the sauce partly from the lobster's own cooking water is the thrifty, sensible core of it; the instruction to crown the platter with the empty head is pure dining-room theatre of a period when a dish was expected to be looked at before it was eaten.