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Lobster in Red Peppers
Prepared same as Crabs in Red Peppers, substituting one pint lobster meat for crab meat.
A one-line variation that assumes you have the crab version in front of you: sweet red peppers hollowed out, filled with shellfish bound in a cream sauce, crumbed and baked. The substitution is straightforward, but lobster behaves differently from crab in two respects worth knowing.
- How much lobster a pint isA pint of picked lobster meat is roughly 1 lb, which takes several small hard-shell lobsters, since picked meat runs only about a quarter of the live weight. Cooked, chilled lobster from the fish counter works and is easier to portion.
- "Red peppers" are sweet, not hotIn American cookbooks of this period a red pepper used as a vessel is the ripe sweet bell or a pimiento type. Choose squat, thick-walled peppers that will sit upright; halve them lengthwise if they will not stand.
- Parboil the shellsUnless the crab recipe says otherwise, cored whole peppers benefit from 4 to 5 minutes in boiling salted water before filling, since the filling only wants heating through. Drain them cut-side down.
- Cut the meat larger than you would crabCrab comes to you already flaked; lobster should be cut in bite-sized pieces rather than shredded, or the texture of the dish disappears into the sauce.
- The filling is already cookedThe filling is likely already cooked -- If the crab version has both shellfish and sauce going in hot and finished, the oven is only browning the crumbs, so a short bake in a hot oven is enough; a long bake turns lobster stringy and dry.
- Oven termsIf your copy of the crab recipe calls for a moderate oven, that is 350F; quick or hot is 425 to 450F.
- YieldA pint of meat fills four large peppers generously, or six smaller ones. Served as a main course with bread and a salad, count on four.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like most house cookbooks of its kind it ranged well beyond the sponsor's product into a full domestic repertoire. Its fish chapter reflects the New England coast: both lobster and crab were widely sold already boiled and picked, or in cans. Stuffing a vegetable with a creamed shellfish mixture and browning crumbs on top was one of the standard turns of the period, applied interchangeably to green peppers, tomatoes, mushroom caps and scallop shells; the terse cross-reference here, sending the cook back to the crab version with a single substitution, is itself characteristic of how these books were compiled.