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Chafing-dish Dainties (Method Cut the lobster)
Method. - Cut the lobster in delicate slices or in dice, as preferred. Make a bechamel sauce, after the usual manner, of the butter, flour, seasonings, cream and stock. Add the lobster, and, when heated thoroughly, add the beaten yolks mixed with a few spoonfuls of the sauce from the blazer.
Add the lemon juice, and sprinkle the dried and sifted coral or some chopped parsley over the top of the mixture as it is served.
Oysters, clams, sweetbread, chicken or turkey may be served à la Bordelaise or Bechamel.
Lobster à la Poulette. 1/3 a cup of butter. 1/3 a cup of flour.
INGREDIENTS. ½ a teaspoonful of salt.
Dash of paprica. ¼ a teaspoonful of white pepper.
1 cup of cream.
1 cup of well-seasoned chicken stock.
Juice of half a lemon. 2 hard-boiled eggs.
1 pint of diced lobster meat.
Cut Method. - Prepare a white sauce, using the ingredients mentioned, and adding the lemon juice by degrees. Add the lobster to the sauce. the whites of the hard-boiled eggs in rings and pass the yolks through a sieve. Serve the lobster on bits of toast, or on thin crackers, with a sprinkling of the yolks over the lobster, and circles of the whites around it.
Oyster Crabs à la Hollandaise.
Remove the meat from one pint of oyster crabs; put this, with a little of the liquor, into the blazer,
Two chafing-dish lobster dishes in the manner of 1900: a bechamel-based version finished with egg yolks, and a lighter poulette served on toast. Both are quick once the sauce is made, and both are ruined at the same moment.
- The hinge: never boil the yolk liaisonOnce the beaten yolks go in, the sauce must be held below a simmer or it will curdle into scrambled threads. Tempering them first with a few spoonfuls of hot sauce, as directed, is what makes this work; keep the blazer over the water pan, not over direct flame, from that point on.
- What a blazer isThe blazer is the shallow upper pan of a chafing dish, set either directly over the spirit lamp or over a hot-water pan below it. Any wide skillet stands in for the direct-heat stage, and a bowl over barely simmering water for the gentle stage.
- CoralCoral is the roe of a female lobster, dark green when raw and bright red when cooked. Dried slowly and pushed through a sieve, it becomes a fine red powder used as garnish. Lobster is not usually sold sexed today, so the chopped parsley alternative is the practical one.
- PapricaAn older spelling of paprika; the paprika sold in American kitchens at this date was generally the sweet Hungarian kind rather than smoked. A dash is conventionally reckoned at about an eighth of a teaspoon.
- Quantities in the pouletteA third of a cup each of butter and flour to two cups of liquid gives a thick, spoon-coating sauce rather than a pouring one — correct for serving on toast. The salt and white pepper figures in this printing are unclear; a half teaspoon of salt and a quarter teaspoon of white pepper are in scale for two cups of liquid, tasted at the end since the stock is already seasoned.
- A pint of diced lobsterThat is about two cups of picked meat, which means two lobsters of about a pound and a half each, or one large one. Cooked, chilled, then diced holds its shape best.
- Order of work for the pouletteMake the sauce and add the lemon juice gradually so it does not break, then fold in the lobster and heat through. Separately slice the hard-boiled whites into rings and sieve the yolks, and assemble on toast or crackers at the moment of serving so nothing softens.
- Oyster crabsThese are the pea-sized crabs that live inside oysters, once collected by shuckers and treated as a delicacy. They are very hard to obtain now; the same Hollandaise treatment suits small shrimp or picked crabmeat.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; this quantity of lobster and sauce would serve roughly four as a first course or light supper, or more on small toasts.
Janet McKenzie Hill assembled this book at the height of the American chafing-dish vogue, when a spirit lamp and a blazer let a hostess cook at the table without a servant — the fashionable equipment of late suppers, club rooms and college lodgings in the 1890s and early 1900s. Lobster suited the format exactly: the meat was already cooked when bought, so the cook only had to build a sauce and warm it through, and the French names — à la Bordelaise, Bechamel, à la Poulette — carried the prestige of the restaurant into the parlour. Poulette, generally traced to the classic white sauce enriched with egg yolk and lemon served with chicken, had by this date detached from poultry altogether and simply meant that finish, whatever it was poured over. The note that oysters, clams, sweetbread, chicken or turkey may be substituted is the real logic of the chapter: a handful of sauces, endlessly recombined with whatever the market offered.