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Lobster Patties
Follow directions for the filling of chicken patties, substituting lobster for chicken.
A cross-reference recipe of the kind common in Delineator-era books: the method lives with the chicken patties, and only the protein changes. A few things are worth knowing before you swap.
- What a patty is hereAlmost certainly not a ground meat cake. In American books of this period a patty is usually a small puff-paste shell (a patty case or bouchee) filled with a thick creamed mixture, though this entry does not say so outright. Frozen puff pastry shells are the practical modern stand-in.
- Crisp the shellsRe-crisp the cases in a hot oven until dry and hollow-sounding, and fill them only at the moment of serving. Filling them early turns the pastry to paste.
- Lobster quantitySubstitute by volume of picked meat, not by weight of shell-on lobster. Check the chicken patty filling for its quantity and match it; as a rule of thumb, two 1 1/4-lb lobsters yield somewhere near a pound of picked tail and claw meat, or about 2 cups.
- The meat is already cookedThis is the hinge. Lobster goes into a hot sauce only to warm through, one or two minutes off a hard boil. Simmering it in the sauce the way you might simmer raw chicken gives you cotton wool.
- Cut sizeHalf-inch dice for claw and knuckle meat, thicker coins for tail. Shredding lobster the way one shreds chicken wastes its texture.
- Season for shellfishA cream sauce built for chicken will taste flat with lobster. A pinch of cayenne, a scrape of nutmeg, lemon juice at the end, and a spoonful of dry sherry are the period-appropriate corrections.
- Canned or frozen lobsterBoth work and both are wetter than fresh. Drain well and pat dry, or the filling will thin out in the shells.
- YieldDepending on the size of the cases, roughly six to eight filled shells from about 2 cups of filling, which makes a first course or a lunch dish rather than a dinner for six.
"Made-over dishes" was a standing chapter in American household books from the 1880s through the 1930s, and its logic was thrift: a cook who had served a boiled or roasted bird bought a second meal out of the remains by creaming the meat and hiding it in pastry. Lobster patties are the luxury version of that habit, and their ancestry runs back through nineteenth-century French service, where a bouchee or vol-au-vent of shellfish in a cream sauce was standard buffet and supper-party food. That this recipe is only one sentence long suggests how thoroughly the technique was assumed: a reader who could make chicken patties needed no further help, and the book's job was simply to point out that lobster would do. Lobster had long since ceased to be cheap coastal protein by this date, and had become a company dish.