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Stewed Lobster
Boil and open the lobster as directed. Cut the meat into dice, measure it, and to every pint allow 2 tablespoonfuls of butter 2 tablespoonfuls of flour 1/2 pint of cream 1/2 pint of stock 1 teaspoonful of salt 1/4 teaspoonful of white pepper Put the lobster into a stewing pan, add the stock and simmer five minutes, then add the cream. Rub the butter and flour together until smooth, then stir this in with the lobster carefully and continually until it thickens, add the salt and pepper and serve very hot.
A teaspoonful of curry powder may be added and it is then Curried Lobster.
A straightforward creamed lobster built on a beurre manié rather than a cooked roux. The proportions are given per pint of picked meat, so scale everything to what your lobsters actually yield.
- How much lobster a pint isA pint of diced meat is somewhere around three-quarters of a pound to a pound, so reckon on two or three lobsters of about 1½ lb each depending on how thoroughly they are picked. Sold-by-weight picked lobster meat works equally well here.
- Half a pintA pint in American measure is 2 cups, so half a pint of cream and half a pint of stock are 1 cup each. Rorer gives no yield, but a pint of meat in this much sauce would serve about four over toast or rice.
- The stockRorer does not say what kind. A fish or shellfish stock suits the dish, and you can simmer the cracked shells and small legs while you pick the meat. Chicken stock will do; clam juice may be salty at this ratio unless you cut the added salt.
- The hinge: the meat is already cookedThe lobster was boiled before it was diced. Five minutes in stock is warming, not cooking, and anything much beyond that turns the meat fibrous and dry. Keep the pan at a bare simmer from the moment the lobster goes in.
- Butter and flour rubbed togetherThis is beurre manié — equal parts soft butter and flour worked to a paste and whisked into hot liquid at the end. It needs two or three minutes at a simmer after it goes in to lose the raw flour taste, but do not let the cream boil hard or it may break.
- White pepperThe usual choice for a pale sauce, where black pepper would show as flecks.
- The curry versionA teaspoon of curry powder stirred straight into cream tastes raw and dusty. Work it into the butter-and-flour paste so it cooks briefly in the sauce, or bloom it in the butter first before adding the flour.
- ServingRorer's insistence on "very hot" matters because the sauce sets and dulls as it cools. Have the toast, patty shells or rice ready before you thicken.
This comes from Sarah Tyson Rorer's Hot Weather Dishes (1888), written while she ran the Philadelphia Cooking School. The book's premise was that summer eating in an era of coal ranges and limited means of keeping food cold needed its own repertoire: dishes cooked quickly, in small quantities, on the top of the stove rather than in a hot oven. Stewed lobster fits that brief exactly hen finfinished in minutes in a stewing pan. Lobster was plentiful and comparatively cheap along the Atlantic coast for much of the nineteenth century, and creamed preparations like this one, along with lobster Newburg and the curried variant Rorer offers as an afterthought, were how it reached genteel tables away from the shore. The curry powder is a mark of the period's taste for a single Anglo-Indian seasoning used as a flavour in its own right rather than as part of a spice tradition.