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Lobster Stew
1 small lobster 3 cups milk Salt and pepper 2 tablespoons flour Cut the lobster meat into small bits. Scald the milk, stirring Pinch of soda 3 buttered crackers 1 tablespoon butter in the seasoning and soda. Dip the toasted buttered crackers in the hot milk and keep them warm. Add the butter and flour well rubbed together to the milk, and when it thickens add the lobster. Cook for five minutes and pour over the crackers.
The ingredient column and the method have been run together in the original typesetting; read the amounts as a list (1 small lobster, 3 cups milk, salt and pepper, 2 tablespoons flour, pinch of soda, 3 buttered crackers, 1 tablespoon butter) and the instructions follow sensibly.
- The hinge: add the lobster lastThe meat goes into the thickened milk for five minutes only, and it is already cooked. Longer than that and lobster turns stringy and squeaky, so keep the heat low enough that the milk never boils once it is in.
- A small lobsterIn this period that means roughly a 1 to 1 1/4 lb hard-shell lobster, boiled and picked, yielding about 1/2 to 3/4 cup of meat. A few ounces of picked claw-and-knuckle meat gives the same result with less work.
- The pinch of sodaBaking soda was added to milk in the belief that it kept it from curdling when shellfish or tomato went in. A pinch is genuinely all it takes; more gives a soapy, faintly brown result.
- Scald the milkHeat to about 180F, when the surface steams and bubbles ring the pan edge. Whole milk behaves best here; skim milk gives a thin stew and separates more readily.
- Butter and flour rubbed togetherThis is beurre manié, not a cooked roux. Work the tablespoon of butter into the two tablespoons of flour to a smooth paste and whisk it into the hot milk in small pieces so it does not lump.
- Buttered crackersCommon crackers or plain soda crackers, split, buttered and toasted. Saltines work; skip additional salt in the milk until you have tasted it.
- YieldThree cups of milk and three crackers point to three light servings, or two as a supper dish.
The technique of splitting, buttering and toasting crackers and pouring a milk stew over them is older New England practice, the same one behind oyster and clam stews along the same coast; the cracker did the work that a bread roll or a pastry case did elsewhere. The pinch of soda is a period fingerprint, common advice in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for keeping milk from curdling against shellfish.