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Lobster Cutlets
2 cups of boiled lobster 3 tablespoonfuls of flour 1 cup of cream or milk 1 tablespoonful of butter Yolks of two eggs 1 tablespoonful of chopped 14 of a nutmeg parsley Salt and cayenne to taste Add all the seasoning to the lobster. Put the cream or milk on to boil, rub the butter and flour together, and add to the cream or milk when boiling. Now add the beaten yolks and cook two minutes. Take from the fire and add the lobster. Mix well; turn out on a dish to cool. When cool, form into cutlets, roll first in beaten egg, then in bread crumbs; put them in a frying basket and fry in smoking hot oil or dripping until a nice brown. It will take about two minutes. Drain and arrange them on a hot dish; put the end of a small claw in each cutlet to represent the mutton bone. Garnish with parsley, and serve with cream or Tartare sauce.
A classic croquette mixture shaped to look like small chops, from the era when a cook was expected to make one food resemble another. The whole dish depends on getting the panade thick enough to hold a shape when cold.
- Quantities in modern termsTwo cups of picked cooked lobster meat is the yield of two to three 1 1/4 lb lobsters. With 1 cup of cream or milk, 3 tablespoons flour and 1 tablespoon butter, the binding paste is deliberately stiff, thicker than a sauce.
- The nutmegThe nutmeg fraction is garbled in the ingredient column; a quarter of a whole nutmeg, freshly grated, is the usual reading and amounts to something like 1/2 teaspoon. More than that will bury the lobster.
- Cook the flour outRubbing butter and flour together raw and stirring it into boiling milk is a beurre manié, not a roux. Let it bubble and thicken for two or three minutes, whisking, before the yolks go in, or the cutlets taste of paste.
- Yolks, then off the heatTwo minutes over gentle heat sets the yolks and stiffens the mixture further, but the pan must not come back to a hard boil once they are in or it will curdle. Beat in a spoonful of the hot base to temper the yolks first.
- Chill properly"Turn out on a dish to cool" means a shallow dish so it cools fast, and in practice the mixture wants at least two hours in the refrigerator — ideally overnight. Warm, soft mixture is the single most common reason cutlets burst in the fat.
- Frying temperature"Smoking hot" oil is imprecise and, in the case of modern refined oils, hotter than you want. Aim for 375F; two minutes is accurate at that heat, since everything inside is already cooked and you are only crisping the crumb.
- CrumbingDry fine breadcrumbs, not fresh, and a light flouring before the egg helps it grip. Crumb the shaped cutlets, then chill them again for twenty minutes so the coating sets.
- The claw "bone"The tip of a small claw pushed into the narrow end is pure Victorian presentation, imitating the exposed bone of a mutton cutlet. Reserve the claw shells when you pick the meat if you want the effect.
- YieldAbout eight to ten cutlets, enough for four as a light main course with the tartare or cream sauce and a salad.
Lobster cutlets belong to the late nineteenth-century taste for trompe l'oeil at table, where a bound mixture of fish, poultry or game was moulded to mimic a joint of meat and finished with a false bone — here a claw tip standing in for the rib of a mutton chop. The technique is a French panade-bound croquette of the kind codified in professional kitchens and then carried into English and American household books. Lobster was expensive, so extending the meat with a cup of thickened cream may also have helped it go further, though the recipe itself makes no such claim.