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Lobster with Pimolas
Mix one cup brown sauce, one cup sliced pimolas, two hard-cooked eggs, cut in slices, one fourth teaspoon salt, few gratings nutmeg, and two tablespoons sautéd mushrooms, with two cups lobster meat. Serve when hot with slices of brown bread toast.
A chafing-dish supper dish that assumes you already have brown sauce and cooked lobster on hand. The whole thing is a reheat, not a cook, so the only real risk is overworking the lobster.
- PimolasA trade name from the period for green olives stuffed with pimiento, sold under that name in the United States around 1900. Pimiento-stuffed Spanish olives are the direct substitute; a cup sliced is roughly 5 oz drained.
- Brown sauceEspagnole or a simple flour-and-butter brown sauce built on beef or veal stock, not gravy from a jar. One cup is enough to bind but not drown; if yours is thin, reduce it before the lobster goes in.
- Lobster meatTwo cups is roughly 10-12 oz picked meat, the yield of two or three 1 1/4 lb lobsters. Cut it in bite-size pieces rather than shredding, and add it last.
- The hingeCooked lobster needs only to warm through, two or three minutes over the chafing-dish flame. Held longer it turns fibrous and squeaks against the teeth, and the sauce will pull water out of it.
- SaltA quarter teaspoon assumes unsalted stock and unsalted sauce. Olives and brown sauce are both salty already, so taste before adding any.
- Hard-cooked eggsSlice them and fold in gently at the end with the lobster; stirring them through hot sauce for any length of time breaks the yolks and clouds the dish.
- MushroomsTwo tablespoons of mushrooms sauteed separately in butter until their liquid has gone. Raw mushrooms added directly will thin the sauce.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; two cups of lobster will stretch to about four as a light supper, with the brown bread toast served hot.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, was a chocolate manufacturer's promotional cookbook that ranged well beyond chocolate, and it appeared amid the fashion of the 1890s and 1900s for cooking at the table. The chafing dish was the equipment of the late supper, the after-theatre party and the college room: it needed no kitchen, no oven and no servant, and it favored dishes assembled from things already cooked or canned. Lobster was the standard chafing-dish protein, and "pimolas" points to the same moment, when pimiento-stuffed olives were a newly available and slightly showy imported grocery. The pairing of a French-derived brown sauce with olives, nutmeg and sliced egg is characteristic of American genteel cooking of the period, which liked a continental base dressed up with whatever the fancy-goods counter had lately begun to stock.