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Curried Lobster in Rice Timbales
2 cups lobster meat 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1 tablespoon chopped onion 1 tablespoon curry 1 cup cream or stock 3 egg yolks salt, paprika and cayenne Melt butter; add onion; when yellow add flour, curry and cream. Cook five minutes. Season; add egg yolks and lobster meat. Sprinkle with finely powdered coral if there is any. Fill rice timbale cases, reheat, and serve. 1 cup rice
A short entrée recipe that assumes two things a modern cook may not: cooked lobster meat on hand, and small metal timbale molds for the rice. The hinge is the egg yolks — once they go in, the sauce must not boil.
- Egg yolks off the heatTake the pan from the burner, stir the yolks into the hot sauce (or temper them with a few spoonfuls of sauce first), and return it to low heat only long enough to thicken. Above roughly 180F the yolks curdle and the curry sauce turns grainy.
- The lobster is already cookedTwo cups of picked meat is about two 1 1/4-lb boiled lobsters. It goes in at the end purely to heat through; simmering it in the sauce will make it stringy.
- A tablespoon of curry is a lotCurry powder of this period was typically a mild, turmeric-forward blend, and may well be milder than some powders sold now. Start with two teaspoons of a modern powder, bloom it in the butter with the onion for a minute to take off the raw edge, and add more to taste.
- CoralThe coral is the dark green roe found only in a hen lobster; it turns coral-red when cooked. Dry it in a low oven and crush it to powder. If your lobster has none, skip it — it is colour and a little richness, not structure.
- Timbale casesThe book gives no method; cooked rice was generally pressed into buttered dariole or small ramekin molds, turned out and hollowed slightly to hold the filling. The stray "1 cup rice" at the end is presumably the amount for the cases -- enough for roughly half a dozen small molds.
- ReheatingThe book says only "reheat." A moderate oven, around 350F, or a pan of hot water, just until warmed -- five to ten minutes -- will do it; longer and the sauce breaks.
- Cream or stockThe book offers either. Cream gives the richer result; fish or shellfish stock gives a sharper, thinner sauce that may want a longer reduction to hold together.
- YieldEnough for four to six as a first course, depending on the size of the molds.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and its non-chocolate chapters read like a fair record of what an American middle-class kitchen thought was elegant around 1907. Curried lobster sits squarely in that taste: curry powder had been a fixture of Anglo-American cookery since the East India trade made it a grocery staple, and by the turn of the century it was a common way to dress up shellfish, chicken or veal in a chafing dish. The rice timbale is the French half of the equation — a timbale takes its name from the drum-shaped mold — and molded cases like these let a small quantity of expensive meat be served as a composed course rather than a spoonful of stew. Lobster itself had by then largely completed its climb from cheap coastal food to hotel luxury, helped by canning and rail shipment, which is why a book from a candy company treats two cups of it as an ordinary purchase.