Lobster, Devilled
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 persons. -1 medium-sized lobster, some salad dressing, finely-grated LOBSTERS, TO DRESS. bread-crumbs, cayenne. AVERAGE COST, 2s. 6d.
Make a saled dressing, using butter in place of oil, season this well with cayenne and add it to the lobster, chopped fine and a small teacupful of bread-crumbs. Clean the shell and put the mixture in, putting bread-crumbs and a small piece of butter on the top; then bake for about 10 minutes till the crumbs are brown.
TIME. About 10 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Lobsters, To Dress. When the lobster is boiled, rub it over with a little salad oil, which wipe off again; separate the body from the tail, break off the great claws and crack them at the joints, without injuring the meat, split the tail in halves and arrange all neatly in a dish, with the body upright in the middle and garnish with parsley.
A Victorian savoury: cooked lobster meat bound in a cayenne-hot dressing, returned to the shell and browned. It stands or falls on the heat of the seasoning and on not overcooking meat that is already cooked.
- Start with a cooked lobsterThe recipe assumes a boiled lobster on the slab, as sold by fishmongers of the period. Buy it cooked, or boil and cool your own; the ten minutes in the oven is only to heat through and brown the crumbs, not to cook raw shellfish.
- "Salad dressing, using butter in place of oil"Beeton's salad dressing is built on egg yolk, mustard, vinegar and cream rather than being a vinaigrette. Softened butter in place of the oil gives a thicker mixture than a pourable dressing would.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the recipe leaves the heat to the cook's judgement. It needs to be hot enough to brown the crumbs within the ten minutes stated.
- A small teacupfulA Victorian teacup is usually reckoned at about a quarter of a pint, so a small teacupful of crumbs is on the order of 4-5 fl oz by volume. Judge by feel: enough to bind, not enough to mask the lobster.
- Cayenne means cayenne"Devilled" is a heat level, not a flavour note. Season the dressing until it is assertively hot on the tongue before the lobster goes in, since the crumbs and butter will blunt it considerably.
- Preparing the shellSplit the body shell lengthwise, discard the stomach sac behind the head and the dark intestinal thread, and scrub the halves. The green tomalley and any coral can be mashed into the dressing for depth.
- YieldA medium lobster of about 1 1/2 lb gives perhaps 6 oz of picked meat, which serves four only as a savoury or first course. As a main dish, count one lobster for two.
Devilling — chopping cooked meat or fish, dosing it with cayenne, mustard and other "hot" seasonings, and browning it — was a fixture of British cooking from the Regency onward, and the verb appears in print for peppery dishes well before Beeton. It suited a household that ate cold joints and boiled shellfish: the devil turned yesterday's protein into something worth serving hot, either at breakfast or as the savoury course that closed a Victorian dinner before the dessert. Beeton's compilations price the dish here at 2s. 6d. for four, and returning the mixture to the cleaned shell was standard practice for presenting it at table without extra dishes.