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Broiled Live Lobster
Live lobsters may be dressed for broiling at market, or may be done at home. Clean lobster and place in a buttered wire broiler. Broil eight minutes on flesh side, turn and broil six minutes on shell side. Serve with melted butter. Lobsters taste nearly the same when placed in dripping-pan and baked fifteen minutes in hot oven, and are much easier cooked.
To Split a Live Lobster. Cross large claws and hold firmly with left hand. With sharp-pointed knife, held in right hand, begin at the mouth and make a deep incision, and, with a sharp cut, draw the knife quickly through body and entire length of tail. Open lobster, remove intestinal vein, liver, and stomach, and crack claw shells with a mallet. Baked Live Lobster. Devilled Sauce.
Prepare lobster same as for Broiled Live Lobster and place in a dripping-pan. Cook liver of lobster with one tablespoon butter three minutes. Season highly with salt, cayenne, and Worcestershire Sauce. Spread over lobster, and bake in a hot oven fifteen minutes. Remove to platter and serve at once, allowing over one and one-half pound lobster to each person.
Fannie Farmer's method assumes a coal range with a hinged wire broiler held over the fire, and a fishmonger willing to split the lobster for you. Both parts translate cleanly to a modern kitchen once you know what the equipment was doing.
- Kill it firstThe single instruction worth changing: drive the knife-point straight down through the head, just behind the eyes, before you draw the cut down through the body and tail. A lobster's nervous system is a chain of ganglia rather than a single brain, so this is not instantaneous, but it is quicker than the original cut alone. Chilling the lobster for 20 minutes in the freezer beforehand makes it sluggish and easier to handle.
- "Buttered wire broiler"A hinged double grill that clamped the split lobster and could be flipped over the coals. Under a modern gas or electric broiler, use a rack about 4 inches from the element and simply turn the halves with tongs; a stovetop grill pan or an outdoor grill is closer to the original heat.
- TimingsEight minutes flesh-side and six shell-side suits a 1 to 1½ lb lobster. Anything over 2 lb needs several minutes more; the meat should be opaque throughout and pull away from the shell, around 135-140F at the thickest part of the tail. Lobster turns cottony fast, so err short and check.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no temperatures; read it as somewhere in the region of 400-450F. Fifteen minutes at that heat is about right for a 1½ lb lobster in a shallow pan (the "dripping-pan" is a roasting or sheet pan).
- What to removeThe "intestinal vein" is the dark digestive tract running the length of the tail, and the "stomach" is the sac behind the eyes. Both come out. The pale green "liver" is the tomalley, which the devilled sauce is built on; the coral roe in a female is edible too and worth keeping.
- A note on tomalleyPublic health agencies now advise against eating lobster tomalley, since the hepatopancreas concentrates PSP toxins and contaminants from the water. If that gives you pause, make the devilled butter with salt, cayenne and Worcestershire alone and skip the liver.
- Cracking the clawsDo this before cooking, as directed. It lets heat in so the claw meat finishes with the tail rather than well after it, and saves fighting with a hot shell at table.
- YieldThe original allows a little over one and a half pounds of live lobster per person, which is roughly a third of a pound of picked meat. Serve with the melted butter the recipe calls for.
Broiled live lobster belongs to a moment when lobster was cheap, abundant and above all local: the New England canneries had been shipping it since the 1840s. That abundance is why the book treats splitting one as a routine skill and why the fishmonger would do it for you on request. Farmer's aside that baked lobster tastes "nearly the same" and is "much easier cooked" is characteristic of her whole project — she came to the Boston Cooking School as a student, later its assistant principal and then principal, and she wrote for ordinary housekeepers, not restaurant chefs, preferring the reliable method to the showy one. The devilled sauce, built on the tomalley and sharpened with cayenne and Worcestershire, reflects the late-Victorian taste for "devilled" dishes, a term generally traced to the 18th century for anything highly seasoned with hot spice.