Curried Lobster
4 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon chopped onion 4 tablespoons flour 2 cups cooked rice 1 cup cream 1 cup stock 1 tablespoon curry 2 eggs salt, paprika Melt butter; add onion; cook until yellow; add flour, curry, liquid; cook until thickened; add eggs, salt and pepper, and coral, if you have it; strain over lobster meat. Serve on a bed of rice garnished with parsley.
Lobster Suprême Prepare the sauce as for Suprême Oysters, substituting two cups of chopped lobster for oysters.
A cream-and-curry sauce poured over cooked lobster, in the terse style of the period: the ingredient list and the method do not quite match, and the amount of lobster is left to your judgment. Read it as a velouté enriched with egg.
- The eggs are the hingeBeat them, temper them with a ladle of the hot sauce, then return the mixture to the pan off the heat or over the barest flame. Once eggs go in the sauce must not boil, or it will curdle and no amount of straining will save the texture.
- How much lobsterNo quantity is given. The companion Lobster Suprême calls for two cups of chopped meat, which is about a pound and suits this amount of sauce; that is the meat of two 1 1/4- to 1 1/2-lb lobsters. Serves four.
- Eggs, probably yolksWhole eggs will set into visible threads; two yolks give the smooth liaison the straining step implies. Straining is not optional here, since it catches the onion and any coagulated egg.
- Curry powderA tablespoon of a mild commercial blend of 1907 is gentler than a tablespoon of a modern hot Madras. Start with two teaspoons and taste. Bloom it in the butter with the flour for a minute so it loses its raw dustiness.
- Stock and creamUse fish stock, or simmer the lobster shells with an onion and a bay leaf for twenty minutes. "Cream" in books of this period generally meant something nearer what we now call light cream than modern heavy cream; heavy cream will make the sauce heavy against the flour already present.
- CoralThe roe of a female lobster, dark green when raw and coral-red when cooked. Mash it with a little soft butter and whisk it in at the end, off the heat, for colour and depth. Rarely available now unless you cook whole lobsters yourself.
- Salt and paprika, salt and pepperThe list says paprika, the method says pepper. Paprika was commonly used in cream dishes of this kind for the tint as much as the flavour; take the list's paprika as the intention.
- The riceTwo cups cooked is about two-thirds of a cup raw long-grain. Cook it plain and hot, mound it, and warm the lobster meat gently in the strained sauce rather than pouring sauce over cold meat.
- Lobster SuprêmeThe second line refers back to the book's Suprême Oysters and its sauce; it is a cross-reference, not a complete recipe. If you do follow it, remember that the timing suited to oysters overcooks already-cooked lobster, which needs only to be heated through.
Lowney's Cook Book was written by Maria Willett Howard and issued in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate maker, which explains the book's heavy weighting toward confectionery and desserts; the fish chapter is standard New England household cooking of the era. Curried lobster belongs to a well-established Anglo-American genre in which commercial curry powder is treated as a seasoning for a French-style cream sauce rather than as the basis of an Indian dish, and it appears in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by which time tinned curry powder was a familiar grocery item. The casual instruction to add "coral, if you have it" suggests lobsters were often bought and boiled whole at home, so the roe was a routine kitchen resource rather than the delicacy it has become.