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Lobster à La Crème
1½ cups boiled lobster 1 tablespoon butter Salt and pepper 1/2 cup water Yolks of 3 eggs 1 cup cream Cut the lobster meat into small pieces and put it in the chafing dish with the butter, seasoning thoroughly. Pour the water over it; cook ten minutes; add the beaten yolks of the eggs and the cream. Bring all to a boil and serve.
A chafing-dish supper dish that hinges entirely on one bad instruction: do not bring it to a boil once the yolks are in. Everything else is straightforward.
- Ignore "bring all to a boil"Egg yolks set around 150-160F and will curdle into scrambled threads well below boiling. Add the yolk-and-cream mixture off direct heat and hold the pan at a bare steam until it coats a spoon, about 170F at the outside.
- The chafing dishA proper chafing dish has a blazer (the metal pan) over a hot-water bath over a spirit lamp. Use the blazer directly over the flame for the first stage and set it into the water pan before the yolks go in — that is what the water bath was for. A heavy saucepan and a low burner do the same job, with a bowl over simmering water for the finish.
- Lobster is already cooked"Boiled lobster" means picked meat from a cooked lobster. Ten minutes in water only leaches flavor and toughens it; two or three minutes to warm through in the butter and water is enough before the enrichment goes in.
- CreamCream of this period was generally lighter than modern heavy cream, often nearer what we would call half-and-half, though it was not standardised and varied a good deal. Heavy cream is more forgiving here, since fat buffers the yolks against curdling.
- Temper the yolksBeat the yolks into the cold cream first, then stir a ladle of the hot lobster liquid into that mixture before returning it to the pan. Yolks dropped straight into hot liquid set on contact.
- SeasoningThe recipe seasons only with salt and pepper, which is austere for a cream sauce. Cayenne, a spoonful of sherry or a squeeze of lemon at the end are all period-appropriate and all welcome.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 cups of lobster and a cup of cream serves three as a light supper course, or four on toast points — the usual chafing-dish service.
Chafing-dish cookery had a genuine vogue in American middle-class homes from the 1890s through the 1910s, and cookbooks of the period often carried a chapter on it. The appeal was social rather than culinary: the dish sat on the table over its own spirit lamp, and the host cooked in front of guests after the theater or at a late supper, without troubling the kitchen or the servants. Lobster was the signature ingredient of the fashion, along with Welsh rarebit and creamed oysters — quick-cooking, expensive enough to signal hospitality, and available canned or already boiled from the fishmonger. "A la crème" here means nothing more elaborate than finished with cream and egg yolks, the same thickening principle behind a French sauce allemande, scaled down to a single pan and an open flame.