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Broiled Live Lobster
Select a heavy lobster. Cut with a quick, sharp thrust the whole length of the body from the mouth down.
Remove the stomach and intestinal canal; reserve the liver or tomalley and coral, if there is any. Crack large claws and place on greased broiler, inserting skewers between the sides of the lobster to keep it open. Place in oven for twenty minutes, then broil over hot coals about five minutes. Serve immediately, plain or with deviled sauce. a 4-pound lobster
A two-stage method: the lobster is roasted in the oven, then finished over coals for smoke and colour. The original gives no temperature and no doneness cue, which is where most of the guesswork lies.
- The hinge: split it cleanly and cook it at onceThe single thrust from the mouth down the length of the body is the long-standing method of despatching and opening the lobster in one motion, and is still broadly how it is done: a heavy chef's knife driven through the head behind the eyes, then drawn down through the tail. It is usually said to be the quickest kill, though not everyone accepts that it is instantaneous. Once split, the lobster is best put under heat promptly rather than left on the board.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature at all. Twenty minutes for a split lobster of this size suggests a hot oven, and a modern cook working from this recipe would need to settle on one; the figure is a reconstruction, not something the book states.
- Judge by temperature, not the clockTwenty minutes in the oven plus five over coals is a long haul for a 4-pound lobster and will overshoot on a smaller one. Tail meat is done at 135-140F at its thickest point; past that it turns fibrous and squeaks against the teeth.
- Tomalley and coralThe green tomalley is the hepatopancreas, the coral the unfertilised roe of a female. Both were prized as enrichers for sauces and stuffings. Note that public health agencies now advise against eating tomalley from American lobster, since it concentrates contaminants and, in some waters, paralytic shellfish toxins; the coral is not covered by the same advice.
- "Heavy" lobsterA hard-shell lobster that feels dense for its length, meaning it is well filled and some way past its last moult. New-shell lobsters are lighter, waterier, and shrink badly under a broiler.
- Broiler and skewersThe "greased broiler" here is a wire broiler or gridiron, quite possibly a hinged double one, rather than the overhead element of a modern range -- the same implement has to go into the oven and then over the coals. Skewers run crosswise between the split halves keep the body flat so it cooks evenly; two metal skewers through the tail will do the same job and stop it curling.
- Deviled sauceIn a book of this period that generally means melted butter sharpened with mustard, cayenne and a little vinegar or Worcestershire, sometimes with the mashed tomalley worked in. The only alternative the recipe itself names is "plain"; drawn butter and lemon would be the usual accompaniment.
- YieldA 4-pound lobster serves two generously, or four as a first course.
Broiling is often said to have been the prestige treatment for lobster in American cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward, when rail and ice made New England shellfish a fixture on hotel and club menus far from the coast. Boiled lobster was everyday; split and broiled lobster, served in the shell with the tomalley intact, was what a restaurant charged for. The instruction to finish over hot coals recalls the era when a coal range gave both an enclosed oven and a live fire, though coals were still used for finishing well after ranges diversified, so it dates nothing on its own. Lowney's, a Boston chocolate company, issued its cook book as promotional literature, which is why a candy manufacturer's volume carries a full fish chapter with a New England shellfish dish set out at professional length.