Garnish
Prepared same as Creamed Lobster, with addition of one teaspoon each of onion juice, Worcestershire sauce, mustard, few grains of cayenne and a few drops of Tabasco.
This is a variation entry, not a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the book's Creamed Lobster in front of you, which is lobster meat folded into a butter-flour-and-cream white sauce. What is added here turns it into what most books of the period would have called deviled lobster.
- Read it as a devil, not a garnishThe section heading is misleading; nothing here is decorative. The added mustard, Worcestershire, cayenne and Tabasco are the whole point. The recipe does not say when to add them; stirring them into the finished sauce off the heat is one sensible way to keep their volatile edge.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine rasp and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze a grated half-onion in cheesecloth. A teaspoon is easily had from a small onion. Grated onion pulp left in will change the texture of a smooth cream sauce.
- MustardMost likely dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard, which is how teaspoon measures usually read in books of this period, though the recipe does not say. If powder, slake it with a little cold water or cream for a few minutes before it goes in, or it will taste raw and dusty.
- Few grains of cayenneA period phrase for a scant pinch, well under an eighth teaspoon. With Tabasco also going in, add the cayenne last and taste.
- Do not boil the lobster meatThe hinge of any creamed lobster. The meat is already cooked; it needs only to heat through in the sauce, two or three minutes over low heat. Held at a simmer it turns fibrous and squeaky and gives up water into the sauce.
- Sauce thicknessAdjust the sauce's seasoning and consistency before the lobster goes in, and keep it thick enough to coat a spoon.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities; the amount depends on the book's Creamed Lobster. Toast points, patty shells, or cleaned lobster shells and ramekins with buttered crumbs browned on top are all presentations found in books of the period.
Lowney's Cook Book was issued in the first decade of the twentieth century by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and compiled by Maria Willett Howard. Like several manufacturer-sponsored books of the era it is a full general cookbook rather than a pamphlet, and its style sits squarely in the Boston Cooking School tradition: cream sauce as a universal binder, onion juice rather than chopped onion, and "a few grains" as a real unit of measurement. The added seasonings here mark the dish as "deviled," a term generally traced to English cookery for anything sharpened with mustard and cayenne; Worcestershire and Tabasco are the later commercial arrivals that American cooks folded into the same formula.