Home › Sandwiches › Lobster Sandwiches
Lobster Sandwiches
Saute thick slices of lobster in butter and sprinkle with lemon juice. Place between slices of buttered toast and serve with hot mushroom sauce.
A terse church-supper formula that assumes you already have cooked lobster meat and a saucepan of mushroom sauce going. Two decisions carry the dish: the lobster must be barely warmed, and the sauce must be ready before the lobster hits the pan.
- Start with cooked lobster"Thick slices" most likely means meat from a boiled or steamed lobster, cut crosswise from the tail so the segments hold together; the recipe does not specify, and canned lobster meat would also have served. Claw meat works but tears; keep it for the sauce if you like.
- Sauté means warm throughSauté here likely amounts to warming through, if the lobster is already cooked -- a minute or so a side in foaming butter over medium heat. Longer and the flesh tightens.
- QuantityThe original gives none. Figure one 1 1/4 lb lobster, which yields roughly 4-5 oz of picked meat all told, for two sandwiches.
- Buttered toast, not breadThe recipe specifies toast, and buttered. Toast holds up better under a wet sauce; butter the slices while hot so it soaks in.
- Hot mushroom sauceMost likely a white sauce or velouté — butter and flour cooked together, thinned with milk or stock — with sautéed mushrooms in it, though period mushroom sauces were sometimes brown-sauce based. Make it first and hold it warm; it takes longer than the lobster.
- LemonThe recipe sprinkles the lobster with lemon juice; a squeeze off the heat is enough. It is there to cut the butter.
- ServingA knife-and-fork sandwich, open or closed; the recipe says only "serve with" the sauce, so pour it over or pass it alongside. Two slices of toast per sandwich, as a luncheon dish.
Lobster occupies a particular place in American community cookbooks of the early twentieth century: canned lobster meat had made it available far inland, and Libertyville, Illinois is a long way from tidewater. A sandwich chapter in a Presbyterian church book reads, plausibly enough, as something close to a guide to entertaining — ladies' luncheons, teas, card parties — where a hot dressed sandwich under sauce counted as a light main course rather than picnic food. The pairing of shellfish with a mushroom-thickened white sauce comes out of the hotel and chafing-dish cookery of the period, the same tradition that gave us lobster Newburg and creamed chicken on toast; the mushroom sauce looks very much like a way of turning a small quantity of expensive protein into something that would feed a table.