Lobster, Hot
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 or 5 persons.-1 lobster, 2 oz. of butter, grated nutmeg; salt, pepper and pounded mace to taste: bread-crumbs, 2 eggs.
AVERAGE COST, 2s. 6d.
Pound the meat of the lobster to a smooth paste with the butter and seasoning and add a few bread-crumbs. Beat the eggs and make the whole mixture into the form of a lobster; pound the spawn and sprinkle over it. Bake 1/4 hour and just before serving, lay over it the tail and body shell, with the small claws underneath to resemble a lobster.
TIME. hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
LOBSTER SALAD.
A Victorian way of making one lobster stretch to four or five: the meat is pounded to a forcemeat, baked, then dressed back into its own shell for the table. Everything hinges on the lobster being cooked before you start pounding.
- Start with a cooked lobsterThe recipe assumes a boiled lobster, as the shell is reserved for presentation and the meat is pounded rather than cooked through. A 1 to 1.5 lb cooked lobster, or the picked meat of two smaller ones, gives roughly the quantity intended.
- Baking time and temperatureNo oven heat is given, and the recipe uses no oven term. Around 350F for the quarter hour the recipe specifies is enough to set the eggs and heat the mixture through; the meat is already cooked, so longer only dries it.
- Pounded maceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed. Blade mace was pounded in a mortar; ground mace from a jar is the direct substitute, and a scant quarter teaspoon is plenty against 2 oz butter.
- The spawnThe coral, the dark roe of a hen lobster that turns scarlet on cooking, was pounded and used as a red garnish. It is rarely sold separately now, and a lobster bought cooked may have none; the dish works without it, with paprika standing in for colour if you want the red dusting.
- Pounding without a mortarA food processor does in seconds what a marble mortar did in ten minutes, but pulse rather than run it. The mixture should hold a shape, not become a puree.
- BindingTwo eggs to the meat of one lobster is generous and will make the mixture loose. Add breadcrumbs by the spoonful until it will stand in a mound on a buttered dish, then shape.
- The shell garnishRinse and dry the head, tail fan and small claws before baking so they can be laid over the finished mound while hot. They are decoration only and are not eaten.
- ServingBest sent to the table straight from the oven, with brown bread and butter or a green salad if you like. The recipe states a dish for four or five persons; by modern appetites that holds as a first course rather than a main.
Mrs Beeton's household books are full of this kind of reconstruction, in which an expensive ingredient is minced, extended with butter, crumbs and egg, and then rebuilt into the silhouette of the whole creature so that the dish looks like more than it cost. The technique belongs to the same nineteenth-century impulse that produced moulded galantines and shaped forcemeats: presentation carried much of a dinner's prestige, and a lobster shell laid over a baked forcemeat announced lobster to the whole table. The stated average cost of 2s. 6d. is a reminder that lobster was then a shop-bought luxury but a far more ordinary one than today.