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Creamed Lobster
Use the Cream Sauce recipe given on page 21, making it in the blazer. Put the lobster (one-half pound will do with the amount of Cream Sauce given) into the sauce, put the blazer into the hot-water pan, half filled with hot water, and allow the lobster to heat thoroughly.
A chafing-dish recipe: the lobster is already cooked, so the whole operation is gentle reheating in sauce. Everything depends on not letting it boil.
- The blazer and hot-water panA chafing dish has two parts: the shallow upper pan (the blazer), which can go directly over the flame, and the hot-water pan beneath it. Make the sauce in the blazer over direct heat, then set it over the water bath. A saucepan set inside a wider pan of simmering water does the same job.
- The hinge: heat, do not cookPicked lobster meat is usually sold already cooked. Held over direct heat or brought near a boil in the sauce it turns fibrous and squeaks against the teeth. Over the water bath it needs only a few minutes, until it is hot through.
- How much lobsterHalf a pound of picked meat is roughly what you get from a 2 lb whole lobster, or from two 6 oz tails. Canned lobster was widely sold in this period and some of Estes's readers would have used it; fresh or frozen tail and claw meat is the modern equivalent.
- The cream sauceThe page-21 sauce is not reproduced here. A period cream sauce of that scale would be something like 2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp flour and 1 cup milk or thin cream, cooked out for a minute or two before the liquid goes in, but nothing of the kind is stated on this page, so follow the book's own recipe if you have it.
- Seasoning it back to lifeFlour-thickened cream sauce with plain lobster is flat without help. Salt, a good pinch of cayenne or paprika, a scrape of nutmeg and a spoonful of sherry stirred in at the end are all consistent with how chafing-dish lobster was served in 1911.
- Cut sizeBreak the meat into large pieces rather than dicing it. Small pieces overheat before the sauce is warm and lose the texture that justifies using lobster at all.
- Yield and servingServes two as a light supper dish, or four on small toast points. Spoon it over buttered toast, split biscuits or puff-pastry shells; the sauce is meant to have something starchy under it.
Good Things to Eat (1911) was written by Rufus Estes, who was born enslaved in Tennessee and spent much of his career cooking in Pullman private railcars before moving to the subsidiary of a Chicago steel company. His book is one of the earliest cookbooks published by an African American chef, and it reflects the fashionable equipment of the moment: the chafing dish, a tabletop rig with a spirit lamp that let a host cook in front of guests. Chafing-dish cookery peaked in American households between roughly the 1890s and the First World War, and it ran heavily to creamed and rarebit-style dishes -- shellfish, cheese, eggs, chicken -- precisely because those cook, or rather reheat, quickly and forgivingly over a small flame. Lobster was a natural fit: canned lobster meat was widely available and comparatively inexpensive, and the water bath built into the dish protected the delicate meat from the heat of the lamp.