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Shell Fish Boiled Lobsters or Crabs
The lobster should be purchased alive and plunged into boiling water in which a good proportion of salt has been mixed. Continue to boil according to size about 20 minutes. Crabs should be boiled in the same manner, but only a little more than half the time is necessary.
To open a boiled lobster, wipe off shell, break off large claws; separate tail from body; take body from shell, leaving "lady" or stomach, on shell. Put aside green fat and coral; remove small claws; remove woolly gills from body, break latter through middle and pick out meat from joints. Cut with sharp scissors through length of under side of tail, draw meat from shell. Draw back flesh on upper end and pull off intestinal cord. Break edge of large claws and remove meat.
This is a method rather than a formula, and the only quantities involved are salt, water and time. The instructions for taking the meat out are still exactly how it is done.
- Salt the water properly"A good proportion of salt" means something close to seawater — roughly 35 g per litre, about 2 tablespoons of coarse salt per quart. Under-salted water leaves the meat flat and slightly waterlogged.
- Timing by weight, not by "size"Twenty minutes suits a larger lobster. Modern practice is closer to 10-12 minutes for a 1 lb lobster and 15 for 1 1/2 lb, adding roughly 3 minutes per additional half pound. Twenty minutes on a small lobster gives cottony tail meat.
- Crabs"A little more than half the time" works out to 8-12 minutes for blue crabs, longer for a large Dungeness — figure 15-18 minutes for one of about 2 lb.
- Return the water to a boilThe one thing the recipe assumes and does not say: start timing only when the pot comes back to a full boil after the shellfish goes in. Use a large volume of water so the recovery is quick.
- Green fat and coralThe green fat is the tomalley (the hepatopancreas) and the coral is the roe of a female. Both were saved for sauces and butters. Current advisories are to eat tomalley sparingly or not at all, since it concentrates contaminants; the coral is generally considered fine.
- The "lady"An old kitchen name for the stomach sac behind the head. It is discarded along with the gills — the "woolly" fingers along each side of the body.
- ToolsKitchen shears through the soft underside of the tail is still the cleanest way in. A short thick-bladed knife or the back of a heavy knife handles the claws better than a mallet, which drives shell splinters into the meat.
- YieldA 1 1/2 lb lobster gives roughly 1/4 to 1/3 lb of picked meat, enough for one person served in the shell or two in a salad or newburg.
Boiling live shellfish in heavily salted water is about as old as coastal cooking, but the confident, almost clinical picking instructions here belong to a particular American moment. By the time this book appeared, lobster had completed its long journey from cheap coastal protein — said by tradition, on thin and disputed evidence, to have been fed to prisoners and servants in colonial New England, and canned in quantity through the nineteenth century — to a hotel and restaurant luxury. Canning and the expansion of rail refrigeration had thinned the inshore stocks and driven prices up, and a home cook buying a live lobster was doing something worth explaining in detail. The green tomalley and the coral, treated here as things to set aside rather than throw away, were prized: they thickened the sauces for lobster Newburg, lobster butter and the bisques that filled the fish chapters of period cookbooks. The word "lady" for the stomach sac appears in a number of nineteenth-century manuals and has since largely fallen out of use.