Home › Shell Fish › Broiled Lobster
Broiled Lobster
Boil the lobster as directed. When cold take off the claws and separate the tail and body, without breaking the shell ; remove the meat in as large pieces as possible. Clean the shell and wipe dry. Arrange it prettily on a dish, garnish with salad leaves or parsley, dotted with quarters of lemons. Now place the meat of the lobster on a wire broiler, baste with melted butter, dust with salt and pepper, and broil quickly over a clear fire. Put it at once into the shell, pour over a little melted butter, and serve very hot.
This is a two-stage dish: the lobster is boiled and cooled first, then the picked meat is briefly seared and returned to the cleaned shell. The whole point is speed at the second stage.
- The hingeThe meat is already cooked. The broiling is for color and the taste of browned butter, not to cook it through — two to three minutes total, turning once. Any longer and boiled-then-broiled lobster turns cottony.
- "A clear fire"Coals burned down past the flame stage, glowing and even, with no smoke. The nearest modern approximation is a gas or electric broiler well preheated, with the meat 3-4 inches from the element.
- Wire broilerA hinged wire grill basket that clamps the food and flips as a unit. A grill basket, or a rack set over a sheet pan under the broiler, does the same job. Buttered meat will drip and flare, so keep it moving.
- Boiling "as directed"Elsewhere in the book. Figure 8-10 minutes at a hard boil for a 1 to 1 1/4 lb lobster, 12-14 for a 1 1/2 to 2 lb, then cool completely — the meat releases from the shell far more cleanly cold than warm.
- Cleaning the shellRinse out the head cavity, discard the gills and the gritty sac behind the eyes, and wipe the inside dry so the presentation shell does not weep water onto the plate. Keep the tomalley and any coral if you want them; whisk either into the finishing butter.
- ButterMelt more than seems necessary: some is for basting, some for pouring over at the table. Clarified butter withstands the heat of a broiler without burning, which is worth the extra step here.
- YieldOne 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb lobster per person as a main course; a 2 lb lobster shell will hold the meat of two smaller ones if you want a fuller-looking dish.
- Timing the plateBuild the garnished shell and the lemon quarters before the lobster goes near the fire. The recipe says "at once" and means it — this dish is unforgiving of a cold plate.
The two-stage method here — boil, cool, pick, sear — is a practical response to a kitchen problem rather than a culinary ideal: a boiled lobster keeps for hours in a cool larder and can be finished to order in minutes, which is exactly what a summer dining room needs. The trick of returning the meat to its polished shell and garnishing the dish with parsley and lemon is pure late-Victorian table style, where a plain ingredient was expected to arrive looking composed.