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To Choose Boiled Lobsters
This shell fish, if it has been cooked alive, as it ought to have been, will have a stiffness in the tail, which, if gently raised, will return with a spring. Care, however, must be taken in thus proving it; ; for if the tail is pulled straight out it will not return; when the fish might be pronounced inferior, which in reality, may not be the case.
In order to be good, lobsters should be weighty for their bulk; if light, they will be watery; and those of the medium size are always the best. Small-sized lobsters are cheapest and answer very well for sauce.
Lobster Canapés. - INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 persons.-12 small croûtons fried in butter, a little lobster butter, the tail of a small lobster, oil, capers, pepper and vinegar. AVERAGE COST, 10d.
Fry the croûtons and when cold spread them with the butter. Cut small slices of the lobster and soak in oil and vinegar for a few minutes. Lay a slice on each croûton and give a seasoning of pepper and cayenne, put 2 or 3 capers on the top and serve on a flat dish, on a stamped paper, garnished with parsley and watercress.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Two things sit on this page: Mrs Beeton's test for a properly cooked lobster, and a short canapé recipe that uses the tail. Both assume you are buying a whole boiled lobster from a fishmonger rather than a pack of picked meat.
- The tail-spring testThe point of the test is that a lobster killed before boiling goes limp, while one cooked from live seizes up and the tail stays sprung. Lift the tail gently and let it snap back; pulling it out straight breaks the muscle and tells you nothing. A modern equivalent: the tail should be tightly curled under the body and the shell should smell clean and of the sea, not of ammonia.
- Weight for bulkStill the best guide at a fish counter. A lobster that feels light for its size is likely to be poorly filled, the shell holding more water than meat. Beeton does not say what size she counts as "medium", but a smaller lobster is generally the more tender.
- Lobster butterThis is not a commercial product. It is butter pounded with the coral (the roe) and the soft shell debris, then sieved — a Victorian way of using everything in the carcass. Softened butter beaten with a little of the coral, or failing that with a spoonful of cooked lobster meat mashed fine, gives the same effect.
- CroûtonsIn this period a croûton is a shaped round or oval of bread fried in butter, not a bread cube for salad. Cut twelve rounds about 1½ in across from a close-crumbed loaf and fry them until crisp and golden, then cool them completely — butter spread on warm croûtons soaks in and the base goes soft.
- Oil and vinegar soak"A few minutes" is all it needs. Cooked lobster in an acid dressing firms up and then turns cottony, so dress the slices no more than five minutes before assembling.
- CayenneThe method calls for cayenne though the ingredient list does not. Treat it as a bare pinch alongside the pepper — enough to warm the lobster, not to colour it.
- CapersVictorian bottled capers were brined and quite sharp. Rinse and pat dry modern ones so the brine does not run into the butter.
- Stamped paperA doily-style paper cut or punched with a pattern, used to line the serving dish. Purely presentational; a plain napkin or nothing at all does the job.
- Yield and costTwelve canapés for four people, so three each — an appetiser, not a course. The "10d." is the average cost in pre-decimal pence and is only useful now as a reminder that lobster was cheap enough to itemise in coppers.
Mrs Beeton's household books treat shellfish selection as seriously as cooking, because in the nineteenth century the buyer had no refrigeration to fall back on and shellfish spoiled fast; pages of this kind — how to choose lobsters, crabs, oysters, prawns — were practical insurance against a bad purchase. The tail-spring test rests on a real piece of butchery: lobsters cooked from live contract their abdominal muscle and hold that curl, so a slack tail suggested a fish that had died before it reached the pot. The canapé recipe attached here probably belongs to a later phase of the Beeton franchise, when the original 1861 Book of Household Management had been expanded by successive editors with French-influenced savouries for the small dinner party. Canapés themselves — the word is French for a couch, the bread being said, by traditional explanation, to be the seat for whatever sits on it — spread through British cookery in the late Victorian and Edwardian decades as the fashionable start or finish to a meal, and lobster, oyster and anchovy versions turn up repeatedly. Such a dish is marked "seasonable at any time".