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Scalloped Lobster
Remove the meat from a two-pound lobster and cut in cubes. Make one and one-half cups of white sauce by melting three tablespoons of butter, add four and one-half tablespoons of flour, one and one-half cups of milk, one-half teaspoon of salt, one-eighth teaspoon of pepper.
Cook until thick. Add the lobster meat, a few grains of cayenne, two teaspoons of lemon juice. Refill the shells, cover with buttered crumbs and bake until crumbs are brown.
A standard cream-bound lobster gratin from the era when a boiled lobster's shell was expected to come back to the table as the serving dish. The recipe assumes you have already cooked the lobster; nothing here brings raw shellfish to temperature.
- Start with a cooked lobster"Remove the meat from a two-pound lobster" presumes a boiled or steamed one. A live 2 lb lobster boiled 12-15 minutes yields roughly 8 oz of picked meat, which is what this quantity of sauce is built around. Two 1 lb lobsters or 8 oz of picked cooked meat work equally well.
- The sauce is deliberately stiffFour and a half tablespoons of flour to one and a half cups of milk is a heavy binding sauce, not a pouring one. That is intentional: it has to hold cubes of lobster in a shell without running out. Cook the roux a minute before adding milk so it does not taste of raw flour.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Bake at 400F for 12-15 minutes, until the filling is bubbling at the edges and the crumbs have coloured. The contents are already cooked, so you are only heating through and browning.
- Buttered crumbsFresh soft breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, about 2 tablespoons butter to 1 cup crumbs. Dry commercial crumbs brown too fast and go sandy; if that is all you have, use less and watch them.
- Refilling the shellsSplit the body shells lengthwise and clean them, or use the two half-shells from each lobster. Ramekins or scallop shells serve the same purpose if the shells broke during picking. A 2 lb lobster fills two halves generously.
- Don't overcook the meatLobster that has been boiled once and then baked a second time turns fibrous quickly. Fold the meat into the sauce off the heat and get the dish out of the oven as soon as the crumbs take colour.
- Cayenne and lemon"A few grains" means a pinch, well under an eighth of a teaspoon. Both the cayenne and the lemon juice are there to cut the butter and flour; add the lemon at the end, off the heat, so it does not thin the sauce.
- YieldServes two as a main course or four as a first course.
Scalloped dishes are generally said to take their name from the shell they were baked and served in, and by the nineteenth century "scalloped" had come to mean anything baked in a shell or shallow dish under crumbs. Serving lobster back in its own carapace was the frugal end of a genteel practice, and a cup and a half of thick white sauce does a good deal of stretching over half a pound of meat. The formula is close kin to lobster Newburg and lobster thermidor, dishes of roughly the same era, but without the sherry, egg yolks or mustard those carry; what remains is the plain butter-flour-milk sauce found throughout the shellfish chapters of books of this kind.