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Bread-crumbs (Parsley Remove all the flesh)
Parsley. Remove all the flesh from the tail and claws of the lobster and cut it up into small pieces. Take the coral of the lobster, wash it, dry it, and then pound it in a mortar with one ounce of butter, and rub it through a hair-sieve. Put in a stewpan one ounce of flour and half an ounce of butter, and mix these together over the fire; then add the water and boil the mixture well. Put in the coral butter, the cream, and the seasoning. Mix well, add the lobster, and turn on a plate to cool. Make up into cutlets, egg and crumb each one carefully, and fry in sufficient fat to cover them. Dish the cutlets on a napkin and garnish with fried parsley.
A Victorian lobster cutlet: a stiff, coral-tinted panada bound with lobster meat, chilled, shaped, breaded and deep-fried. The method survives intact even though several quantities in the ingredient list do not.
- The hinge: chill it hardThe mixture must be spread thin on a plate and refrigerated until genuinely firm — an hour at least, and better still overnight. Warm or soft panada will burst in the fat, and no amount of egg-and-crumb will save it.
- Missing quantitiesThe original text gives no measure for the water, the cream or the seasoning; the definite articles suggest an ingredient list that has not survived with the method. For guidance, a panada stiff enough to shape wants far less liquid than a pouring sauce — begin with about a quarter-pint (roughly 150 ml) to 1 oz flour and half an ounce of butter, and add the cream by the spoonful at the end, stopping while the mixture still holds a shape on the spoon.
- CoralCoral is the roe of a hen lobster, dark greenish-black when raw and scarlet when cooked. It is what colours and flavours the butter here. Lobsters sold today are not generally selected for roe, so you may well have none; if so, a teaspoon of tomato puree gives colour but not flavour, and the cutlets are simply paler.
- Passing the coral butterA hair sieve was a fine mesh of horsehair. A fine nylon drum sieve or a tamis does the same work; push the pounded coral and butter through with a plastic scraper so no grains remain to speck the mixture.
- Stewpan and the rouxA stewpan is a straight-sided saucepan. Cook the flour and butter together for a minute or two without colouring, then add liquid and boil it well — the original insists on this, and it matters, because underboiled flour tastes raw and the paste will not set.
- Frying"Sufficient fat to cover them" means deep-frying, at 350-360F (175-180C). Fry in small batches for 2-3 minutes, until the crumb is deep gold; the filling is already cooked and only needs heating through.
- Fried parsleyUse dry, curly parsley and lower it into the fat away from your face — wet parsley spits violently. It takes about ten seconds and should stay bright green, not brown.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. The meat of one large lobster (about 1.5 lb / 700 g) with a panada of this kind will make roughly eight small cutlets, enough for about four as a first course.
Cutlets like these belong to the late-nineteenth-century Anglo-French repertoire, in which almost any cooked flesh — lobster, chicken, sweetbread, salmon — was bound with a stiff bechamel or panada, chilled, cut to the outline of a lamb cutlet and fried, often with a fragment of claw shell pushed in to imitate the bone. The appeal was partly economy, since a single shellfish could be stretched to serve four, and partly the Victorian taste for dishes that presented one thing in the shape of another. Coral butter, pounded in a mortar and forced through a sieve, was a standard kitchen preparation used to colour and enrich lobster sauces and soups; it is the reason these cutlets were expected to come to the table a pale pink rather than plain white. The napkin under the cutlets is a service convention of the period, meant to absorb frying fat and keep the crumb crisp on its way to the dining room.