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Shellfish: Lobster
Curry of Lobster. cupful lobster meat, 1/4 cupful meat stock, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 tablespoonful flour, 1 teaspoonful salt, Let Dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce, teaspoonful white pepper, 1 teaspoonful curry powder, 1 tablespoonful minced onion, 3 slices toast.
Cut the lobster into small pieces and season with half the salt and pepper. Put the butter and onion on MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK the fire in a frying pan, and cook until the onion turns straw color; then add the flour and curry powder and stir until brown. Gradually add the stock to this, stirring all the while.
Season, and cook for three minutes.
Strain this into a saucepan, and add the lobster. Cook for five minutes.
Cut the slices of toast in strips and lay in a warm dish. Pour the lobster over these, and serve at once.
Breaded Lobster. 1 large lobster, 1 egg, 1 teaspoonful salt, teaspoonful pepper, Dried bread crumbs, Fat for frying.
Split the claws and tail and set aside. Take the meat from the large joints and body and chop fine. Mix with this teaspoonful salt and 2 tablespoonfuls tomalley. Shape into three small, flat cakes. Season the lobster with salt and pepper. Beat the egg in a soup plate. Dip the pieces of lobster and the little cakes, one at a time, into the egg; then roll in erumbs, and, after arranging on a plate, put in a cool place. Put the breaded lobster in the frying basket, and cook in fat until crisp and brown. Serve with Sauce Tartare.
Lobster (French style).
Chop an onion and put it in a stewpan with 2 ounces butter; fry light brown; mix with it a tablespoonful flour; add 1/2 pint milk, a teaspoonful salt, a little pepper and cayenne, nutmeg, and chopped parsley. Boil till rather thick; put in lobster meat cut in pieces. Let it boil up, add yolk of an egg, and a little cream, mix quickly; fill the shells, egg and bread-crumb them; put in the oven for ten minutes; brown, and serve.
Creamed Lobster. 1 cupful lobster meat, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 teaspoonful grated onion 1 tablespoonful flour, 1 cupful stock, 1 tablespoonful lemon juice, 1 cupful cream, Yolk 1 egg.
Cut the lobster meat into inch dice.
Put the butter in a saucepan with the grated onion, let them cook a minute, then add the flour. Stir for a few minutes, and add, slowly, the stock and lemon juice. When this thickens, add the lobster meat, turning carefully so as not to break it. When the meat is heated, remove from the fire and mix cream with the yolk of an egg beaten in it. Replace on the fire for a minute, and serve on toast or in timbales.
Rissoles of Lobster.
Mince the meat from a boiled lobster, season with pepper, salt, and a little mace. Add 3 tablespoonfuls melted butter and some bread crumbs; roll into balls, dip in yolk of beaten egg, put more crumbs over them, and fry brown.
Langosta à la Catalana (Mexican recipe).
Remove lobster meat from the shell, lay it in a bowl so as to save all the liquor, and cut in quarters.
Chop 4 large onions and a bunch of parsley, mash 4 cloves of garlic, and fry together in cupful olive oil until nearly brown. Season with salt and cayenne; add the lobster with the juice, a cupful washed rice, and a tablespoonful of capers. Cook until the rice is done. When serving, put whole pimentoes on top.-MAY E.
SOUTHWORTH.
Lobster à la Newburg. 2 hard-boiled eggs, pint cream or milk, 2 tablespoonfuls flour, 2 tablespoonfuls butter.
Put butter in saucepan, and when melted, add flour gradually, then cream or milk. Mash yolks of eggs and moisten with 2 tablespoon- SHELLFISH fuls milk then add to ingredients in saucepan. Add salt and cayenne, and stir until thick and smooth. Add a cupful boiled lobster and the whites of the eggs cut in strips.
Cangrejueloe (Mexican recipe). 1 teaspoonful butter, pound ham, 1 onion, Dash salt, Dash chili powder, 1 pint picked shrimps, pint washed rice, 1 bay leaf, thyme, and parsley. are Put the butter in a saucepan; when hot, add the ham, chopped fine, onion, salt, and chili powder. When these well browned, add the shrimps and stir until hot; then put in the washed rice and parsley. Cover and simmer with sufficient water added to cook the rice until each grain stands out alone.
A page of seven lobster preparations built on the same foundation: a butter-and-flour roux, a liquid, and cooked lobster meat warmed through at the end. The hinge in all of them is that the lobster is already cooked, so it wants heating, not cooking.
- Start with cooked lobsterEvery one of these assumes picked meat from a boiled lobster. Two 1 1/4-lb lobsters will yield roughly a cup of meat, give or take; a cup of picked claw and tail runs somewhere around 5 to 8 oz depending on how it is packed. Add it at the very end and give it two or three minutes at a bare simmer — the five minutes in the curry is about as far as you would want to go before the meat turns fibrous.
- Dropped fractionsSeveral quantities have lost their fractions in printing, and the originals cannot be recovered with certainty. The likeliest readings are 1/2 teaspoonful pepper, 1/2 pint cream or milk in the Newburg, 1/2 pound ham and 1/2 pint rice in the last recipe, and perhaps 1/2 cupful olive oil for the Catalana. Where the amount of lobster is given simply as "cupful", a cup is a reasonable reading.
- TomalleyThe green liver of the lobster, used here to bind the breaded cakes. It is edible but concentrates contaminants, so most advice now is to eat it sparingly and not at all from lobsters of unknown origin. Two tablespoonfuls of thick mayonnaise or a beaten yolk will bind the cakes instead.
- Frying temperatureThe book gives no temperature; "fat for frying" here means deep fat in a frying basket, which modern practice would put at about 360–375F. Chilling the breaded pieces first, as directed, is not optional — it sets the crumb coat so it does not slide off in the fat.
- The oven finishThe French-style lobster goes back into the shells and into the oven for ten minutes. The book gives no temperature; a hot oven, around 400–425F, or two or three minutes under the broiler will do, since the filling is already cooked and only wants browning.
- Egg-yolk liaisonIn the creamed lobster and the French style, the yolk goes in off the heat and the pan returns to the fire for one minute only. Above about 180F the yolk curdles and the sauce breaks. Keep it below a simmer.
- Newburg without sherryThis version thickens with flour and mashed hard-boiled yolks rather than the usual cream-and-sherry custard. It is closer to a lobster cream sauce; a tablespoon of dry sherry stirred in at the end brings it into line with the familiar dish.
- Rice dishesThe Catalana and the shrimp dish both cook raw rice in the pan. Figure roughly twice the volume of liquid to rice and 18–20 minutes covered over low heat. In the Catalana the shellfish will overcook over that span — better to hold the lobster back and fold it in for the last three minutes.
- TabascoMcIlhenny's was the standard brand name of the period and still is. A dash means three or four drops; the curry powder and salt carry the seasoning.
- YieldEach of the cream-sauce dishes serves two to three on toast. The Catalana and the shrimp-and-rice dish serve four.
Lobster's place in a general household manual of this era says something about how fast the animal's reputation had moved. Within living memory of the book's first readers, lobster had been cheap coastal protein, often said to have been fed to servants and used as bait; canning and then refrigerated rail freight turned it into a restaurant luxury by the 1880s, which is why these treatments are so uniformly rich and French-inflected — curry, Newburg, rissoles, a gratin in the shell. Newburg is generally traced to Delmonico's in New York in the 1870s, and its appearance in a domestic compilation shows how quickly a chef's dish became something a competent home cook was expected to manage. The two Mexican entries and the credit to May E. Southworth, a California cookbook writer of the period, point to the other habit of these compendia: recipes were freely gathered from magazines, other authors and correspondents, and printed with whatever attribution happened to travel with them.