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Lobster and Other Sea Fish (Add two tablespoonfuls)
add two tablespoonfuls of butter, a dash of paprica and a scant half-teaspoonful of salt, and let cook three or four minutes without boiling. Set the blazer over hot water and add three-fourths a cup of hollandaise sauce (either hot or cold). Stir until the mixture is heated, then add one tablespoonful of lemon juice and one teaspoonful of chopped parsley. Serve on toast, in Swedish timbale cases or in patty cases.
This is the tail end of a chafing-dish lobster recipe: the page picks up after the meat has been cut up and set in the blazer. Everything here is about finishing a butter-and-hollandaise sauce without splitting it.
- The recipe begins mid-sentenceThe missing opening almost certainly called for cooked lobster meat, cut in pieces, put into the blazer, but the quantity is not on this page and can only be guessed at.
- The blazer and the hot-water panA chafing dish has two pans: the blazer sits directly over the flame, the hot-water pan goes between them for gentle heat. "Set the blazer over hot water" means convert it to a double boiler. A skillet over a saucepan of barely simmering water does the same job.
- Why it must not boilThe hinge of the dish. Hollandaise is an emulsion of egg yolk and butter; above roughly 180F the yolk curdles and the sauce separates into grease and grain. The direct-flame stage is only long enough to warm the lobster in butter, and the sauce goes in only after the pan is over water.
- PapricaSimply paprika, at this date usually a sweet rather than hot pepper, used as much for color as heat. A dash is conventionally reckoned at about 1/8 teaspoon.
- Hollandaise, hot or coldThree-fourths of a cup is roughly the yield of a two-yolk hollandaise. Cold hollandaise from the refrigerator is stiff; let it come to room temperature and add it in spoonfuls, stirring each in before the next, or the temperature shock will break it.
- Lemon and parsley at the endBoth go in with the pan still over hot water, once the mixture is heated through. The acid is there to brighten a sauce already rich with butter, and parsley added early turns drab and loses its scent.
- Swedish timbale casesNot the baked custard timbale but a fried batter shell: a hot cup-shaped timbale iron is dipped in a thin batter and then lowered into hot fat, so the batter crisps into a cup. Bought vol-au-vent shells, small puff-pastry cases or plain buttered toast points all serve.
- YieldWith the lobster quantity missing the recipe gives no yield; the sauce quantity suggests a few small chafing-dish servings. Reheating is risky, as a warmed hollandaise readily breaks.
Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing Dish Dainties belongs to the chafing-dish vogue that ran through American entertaining from the 1890s into the 1910s, when a spirit lamp and a nickel-plated blazer became the standard wedding present and the standard prop for late supper after the theatre. The appeal was theatrical as much as culinary: the hostess cooked at the table, which made lobster, oysters and terrapin into performances rather than kitchen work. Lobster suited the format because it arrives already cooked and needs only warming through in a sauce, and hollandaise was the most impressive thing a cook could put on it. The double insistence here on hot water and no boiling reflects a real hazard of the equipment: an alcohol flame under a thin metal pan gives fierce heat, and the water bath was one of the few throttles available.