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Lobster Farci
2 cups of boiled lobster Yolks of three hard boiled eggs 1 tablespoonful of chopped parsley 1 tablespoonful of butter 2 tablespoonfuls of bread crumbs 1/2 pint of milk I even tablespoonful of flour ¼ nutmeg, grated Salt and cayenne to taste Cut the lobster into small pieces. Put the milk on to boil. Rub the butter and flour together, and stir into the milk when boiling; stir until smooth, take from the fire, add the bread crumbs, parsley, lobster, hard boiled eggs mashed fine, salt, nutmeg and cayenne; mix all well together. Be careful when opening the lobster not to break the body or tail shells. Wash the shells and wipe them dry, and with a sharp knife or scissors cut off the under part of the shell. Now join the large ends of the two tail shells to the body, forming a boat. Put the farci into these shells, brush it over the top with beaten egg, sprinkle lightly with bread crumbs and place in a quick oven for fifteen minutes to brown. Serve hot in the shells garnished with parsley.
A late-Victorian stuffed-lobster dish: a thick béchamel bound with hard-boiled yolk and bread, packed back into the cleaned shells and browned. The whole thing depends on the sauce being stiff enough to hold its shape.
- "1/4 nutmeg, grated"The "14 nutmeg" in the text is almost certainly a typesetting corruption of 1/4 nutmeg — roughly a quarter of a whole seed, which grates out to something like half a teaspoon. Whole nutmegs were the usual form in the period.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. Fifteen minutes at that heat is for colour only — the lobster, eggs and sauce are all already cooked, so pull the shells as soon as the tops are speckled brown.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. With a tablespoon each of butter and flour this gives a fairly loose sauce; the two tablespoons of crumbs and the mashed yolks are what stiffen it. If it still slumps, cook the sauce down a little further before adding the lobster rather than adding more flour.
- The hinge: don't cook the lobster twiceThe lobster goes in off the heat, and the oven stage is short. Lobster that is simmered in the sauce or held long in a hot oven turns fibrous and squeaks against the teeth.
- Boiled lobsterTwo cups of picked meat is roughly what you get from two 1 1/4-1 1/2 lb lobsters, which conveniently also supplies the shells. Include the tomalley if you like it.
- Building the shell boatsSplit the lobster along the underside rather than through the back, and cut away the soft membrane on the belly of the tail with scissors. Two tail shells butted against the cleaned body shell make one long boat; sitting them in a bed of crumpled foil keeps them upright in the oven.
- YieldServes four as a first course or two as a light main, depending on how many shells you fill.
Farci is simply French for "stuffed," and the borrowing is the point: American cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s reached for French terms to lift a dish of leftover shellfish and white sauce into something fit for company. The technique is the same one behind coquilles and deviled crab — bind cooked shellfish in béchamel, return it to its own shell, crumb the top and brown it — a nineteenth-century solution to serving an expensive ingredient in a way that stretched it and arrived at the table looking whole.