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Scalloped Lobster
6 pounds of lobster, live weight 1/2 pint of milk I large tablespoonful of butter 1 tablespoonful of flour 1 tablespoonful of chopped parsley 1/2 cup of stale bread crumbs Salt and cayenne to taste Put the milk on to boil. Rub the butter and flour together and stir into the milk when boiling. Boil the lobster, open as directed and cut the meat into dice. Put a layer of the white sauce in the bottom of a baking dish, then a layer of lobster, season with salt and cayenne, then a sprinkling of parsley and bread crumbs, then another layer of white sauce, and so on until all is used, having the last layer sauce, sprinkled over with bread crumbs. Put in a quick oven fifteen minutes to brown. Serve in the dish. Or, it may be arranged in small individual dishes or the lobster shells.
A plain lobster gratin from an era when lobster was cheap and cooks bought it live by the pound. The only real technique here is the white sauce, and the only real risk is overcooking meat that is already cooked.
- The hinge: don't cook the lobster twiceThe meat goes into the dish already boiled, so the fifteen minutes in the oven is only to heat through and brown the crumbs. Assemble with the sauce hot and pull the dish as soon as the top colours; longer and the lobster turns fibrous and squeaky.
- "6 pounds of lobster, live weight"That is two lobsters of about 3 lb each, or three of 2 lb, yielding roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of picked meat. About 1 1/2 lb of cooked lobster meat, or a good frozen equivalent, substitutes directly.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. At that heat the crumbs should brown in the stated fifteen minutes; a broiler for the last minute or two does the same job with less standing time.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. With a tablespoon each of butter and flour that gives a thin-to-medium sauce, which is what you want for layering — a stiff bechamel would smother the lobster. Season the sauce itself as well as the layers.
- Stale bread crumbsDry crumbs torn from a day-old loaf, not the fine sandy commercial kind and not panko. Toss the topping crumbs with a little melted butter if you want an even brown.
- Cayenne, not paprikaCayenne here reads as a warming note behind the lobster rather than heat for its own sake; an eighth of a teaspoon in the sauce is plenty. Later versions of the dish often use dry mustard or a dash of sherry in a similar role.
- Serving in the shellsIf you use the half-shells, scrub and dry them and set them on a bed of coarse salt in the pan so they sit level. Baking cups or ramekins need the same fifteen minutes.
- YieldProbably six as a light main course, or eight in small individual dishes; the recipe gives no yield.
Scalloping -- layering cooked meat or fish with sauce and crumbs and browning the top -- was a common way to stretch shellfish, and it appears in many American household manuals of the 1880s and 1890s alongside scalloped oysters, scalloped clams and scalloped salmon. The term is generally traced to serving such mixtures in a scallop shell, which may be why the recipe offers the lobster shells as an alternative dish. Lobster was still relatively cheap and plentiful in the northeastern United States compared with later decades, though prices were already rising by the end of the century; cooks bought it live and by weight. The instruction to "open as directed" points back to a general method given earlier in the book, a common shorthand in period cookbooks that assumed the reader would work through from the front.