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Creamed Lobster in Fontage Cups
2 cups lobster meat 2 tablespoons flour 2 tablespoons butter cup chicken stock 1 tablespoon grated onion 1 cup cream 1 tablespoon lemon juice 1 egg yolk salt and cayenne Melt butter; add onion, flour, stock and lemon juice; cook five minutes; season with salt and pepper; add cream, in which yolk of egg has been beaten, and lobster meat. When hot, serve in fontage cups.
A simple velouté-cream sauce carrying picked lobster, meant to be spooned into fried batter shells at the moment of serving. The sauce is quick; the shells are the project.
- The missing measurementThe stock is given only as "cup chicken stock," with the fraction dropped in printing — most likely ½ cup, which balances the 1 cup of cream and 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour. Treat it as ambiguous and add stock gradually until the sauce coats a spoon.
- Fontage cupsThese are thin batter shells made on a fontage or timbale iron: a shaped metal form dipped in batter, then plunged into hot fat so the batter sets around it and slips off as a cup. The irons are still sold for Scandinavian rosettes and timbale shells. Puff-pastry vol-au-vent cases or toast cups substitute without much loss.
- Once the yolk goes in, no boilingThe yolk is beaten into the cream and the mixture added at the end. From that point hold the pan below a simmer — around 170-180F — or the egg will granulate and the sauce will break.
- Lobster quantityTwo cups of picked meat is roughly 8-12 oz depending on how loosely it is packed, which means about two 1¼-lb hard-shell lobsters, or one of 2 to 2½ lb. The meat is already cooked, so it only needs to be heated through; a minute or two is enough before it toughens.
- Salt and cayenne, not pepperThe ingredient list calls for cayenne and the method then says pepper. Cayenne is the intended seasoning here and suits lobster better; a scant pinch is plenty in a sauce this pale.
- Grated onionA tablespoon of onion grated on a box grater gives juice and pulp rather than pieces, which is the point — it dissolves into the roux and leaves no texture. Cook it in the butter before the flour goes in so it loses its rawness.
- Yield and timingEnough for four as an entrée course, six as a light first course. Fill the cups only at the table-ready moment; the sauce softens fried shells within a few minutes.
Fontage cups belong to the elaborate, French-influenced service that American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s recommended for the "entrée" — the small made dish that came between fish and roast. The iron itself belongs to the same family of dipped-batter tools that produced Swedish rosettes, and by the turn of the century Boston cooking-school authors were treating fontage or timbale cases as a standard way to serve any creamed mixture: lobster, sweetbreads, chicken, mushrooms. Lowney's Cook Book, published by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company of Boston, was a general household manual built around promoting its own cocoa and chocolate, and its non-chocolate chapters draw on the conventional cooking-school repertoire of the day — which is why a lobster entrée in fried batter cups sits comfortably in a book best remembered for fudge and cocoa frosting.