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Browned Bread-crumbs (Mince half a pound of the meat)
One Lobster. One gill of White Sauce. One tablespoonful of Mayonnaise Sauce. Pepper, Salt, Nutmeg. One gill of Aspic Jelly. Mince half a pound of the meat of the lobster finely, put it into a basin with the white sauce, Mayonnaise, aspic jelly, pepper, salt, and nutmeg.
Mix well, steam until quite hot, serve in Ramequin cases with browned bread-crumbs sprinkled over it.
A savoury-course dish: cooked lobster bound with sauce, warmed through and gratinated in small cases. The recipe assumes you have the sauces on hand from elsewhere in the book, so quantities need judgement.
- The missing ingredient listThe original names white sauce, mayonnaise and aspic jelly without amounts. For half a pound of lobster meat, roughly 4 fl oz of white sauce, 2 tablespoons of mayonnaise and 2 tablespoons of melted aspic make a mixture that holds together without slumping; the book genuinely gives no figures, so this is inference rather than conversion.
- The hinge: never let it boilMayonnaise is an egg emulsion and will split into oil and curds if it is heated too far. Steam the mixture only until it is hot to the finger, as the recipe directs, and stir once or twice so the outside does not overheat before the centre warms.
- Aspic jellyA clear, well-reduced stock set with its own gelatine, which a well-provisioned Victorian kitchen would have had standing. A strongly reduced fish or shellfish stock with a little leaf gelatine does the same job; if you leave it out, add a spoonful more white sauce and accept a slightly looser filling.
- Ramequin casesSmall porcelain or fireproof china cups, or the stiff paper cases used for the savoury course. On the quantities suggested above, half a pound of lobster would fill about four small cases.
- Browned bread-crumbsNot fresh crumbs. These are dry crumbs from stale crust, sieved and toasted in the oven or in butter until sandy and pale brown, then kept in a jar. The recipe simply sprinkles them over the already hot filling; it does not call for any further browning.
- Lobster quantityHalf a pound of picked meat is more than a 1 1/2 lb cooked lobster will usually give; reckon on one of two pounds or more, tail and claws together. Mince rather than dice: the point is a smooth bound mixture, not visible chunks.
- The nutmegGrated nutmeg with shellfish was common in British cookery of this period and is worth keeping — a scrape, not a spoonful.
- ServingMeant as a hot savoury at the end of dinner, one small case per person. As a first course, two cases with toast make a better showing.
The savoury was a fixed feature of the late-Victorian and Edwardian dinner: a small, hot, sharply seasoned mouthful served after the sweet, more or less unique to British table practice and often explained as a means of finishing the last of the wine. Lobster, potted or minced and bound with sauce, was one of the standard fillings, along with cheese, anchovy, marrow and mushroom. The construction here is characteristic of professional cookery of the period, where a kitchen kept white sauce, mayonnaise, aspic and browned crumbs standing ready and a dish was assembled from them in minutes rather than built from scratch — which is why the recipe reads as a list of components with no quantities attached. The title on this page belongs to one of those standing preparations rather than to the entry it now sits above, though how the mismatch arose is unclear.