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Creamed Lobster (Salt pepper cayenne)
salt, pepper, cayenne 4 tablespoons butter 4 tablespoons flour parsley 2 cups cream 1 red pepper cut in ribbons 1 teaspoon lemon juice Make a white sauce of butter, flour, seasonings and cream. Parboil red pepper, add to sauce with lobster meat, reheat, and serve on rounds of buttered toast.
A plain cream sauce built on a butter-and-flour roux, with lobster folded in at the end. The ingredient list as printed omits the lobster itself, so the quantity is left to the cook.
- How much lobsterThe list gives no amount; the method assumes you have it. Two cups of sauce will carry roughly 1 lb of picked cooked lobster meat; since a lobster yields only about a quarter of its live weight in meat, that means several 1 1/4-lb lobsters. It serves four on toast.
- Do not boil the sauce after the lobster goes inThis is the hinge. Cooked lobster reheated at a simmer turns tough and stringy within a minute or two. Bring the sauce to the point of steaming, fold the meat in off direct heat, and give it just long enough to warm through.
- Cream, then and nowPeriod "cream" was generally thinner than today's heavy cream, nearer modern light cream at about 18-20% fat; half-and-half is thinner still, around 10-12%. Heavy cream will make the sauce very rich and thick with 4 tablespoons of flour behind it; light cream or half-and-half gives a sauce probably nearer what the book had in mind.
- The rouxFour tablespoons each of butter and flour to two cups of liquid gives a sauce in the medium-to-thick range used for creamed dishes, firm enough to sit on toast without soaking through. Cook the flour in the butter a minute or two before adding liquid so the sauce does not taste pasty.
- Red pepper cut in ribbonsThis means a fresh sweet red pepper in thin strips, not a chili and not the cayenne listed separately. "Parboil" here is two or three minutes in salted water, just to soften; the strips are as much for colour against the white sauce as for flavour.
- CayenneUnmeasured, like the salt and pepper. A scant pinch is enough to lift the lobster; more than an eighth of a teaspoon in two cups of sauce starts to read as heat rather than seasoning.
- ParsleyListed but never mentioned in the method. It is a finishing garnish, chopped fine and scattered over the plated dish.
- The toastRounds cut from firm white bread, toasted and buttered. Cut and toast them last so they are still crisp when the sauce goes over.
Creamed shellfish on toast was the standard American answer to "what do we do with expensive seafood in front of company" from the 1880s through the 1920s, and it shows up in many general cookbooks of the period alongside its close relative, lobster Newburg. The technique is French in ancestry — a béchamel enriched and used as a binder — but the presentation on buttered toast rounds is thoroughly Anglo-American, a luncheon and chafing-dish dish rather than a dinner course. Lowney's Cook Book, published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, was one of the manufacturer-sponsored cookbooks that proliferated around 1900: the firm sold chocolate and cocoa, and the book existed largely to put those products in front of home cooks, but it was padded out into a complete general household cookery with sections like this one that have nothing to do with chocolate at all.