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Curried Lobster
Prepare as Scalloped Lobster, adding to flour one-half teaspoon curry powder when making White Sauce.
A one-line variation that depends entirely on its parent recipe: everything here rides on Scalloped Lobster and the white sauce that binds it.
- Read the parent recipe firstNothing in this line stands alone. Find Scalloped Lobster in the same section and work from it; the only change is half a teaspoon of curry powder stirred into the flour before the milk goes in.
- Why the curry goes into the flourAdding the powder with the flour means it cooks in the hot butter rather than being stirred into finished sauce, which is generally held to take the raw, dusty edge off the spice.
- Half a teaspoon is period-scaledHalf a teaspoon is restrained -- Commercial curry powders of the period are usually described as milder and more turmeric-led than many jars sold now, though blends varied. Against modern powder, half a teaspoon in a white sauce of this size will read as very mild, and cooks wanting the dish to taste 'curried' may prefer nearer a full teaspoon.
- The white sauceThe book's white sauce is given in several thicknesses; the medium proportion is 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, with salt and pepper. Check the parent recipe for which it specifies, since that is the base being adjusted here.
- Oven heatIf the parent recipe calls for browning, follow the wording it actually uses. The lobster is already cooked, so the bake need only be long enough to heat through and colour the crumb topping.
- LobsterThe dish assumes lobster already boiled and picked; take the quantity and the size of the pieces from the parent recipe. Picked claw and knuckle meat from the fish counter does the same job. Do not let it sit in simmering sauce, or it turns fibrous.
- Serving vesselsScallop shells or individual ramekins were the usual dishes for this sort of preparation, and the name is traditionally explained by them. One small gratin dish per person, or a single shallow baking dish, works the same way; scale the servings from the quantity in the parent recipe.
Curry powder reached American cookbooks largely through the British table rather than directly from India, and by the end of the century it was a familiar pantry jar. Fannie Farmer's book treats it exactly as this line suggests: not as the basis of a distinct cuisine, but as a seasoning that could be dropped into an existing white-sauce dish to make a second recipe out of the first. That thrift is characteristic of the Boston Cooking-School method, which built a great many dishes on a handful of memorised base sauces so a cook could vary them without relearning anything. Lobster had also shifted status by the time this book appeared; often described as cheap enough to feed servants and inmates along the New England coast earlier in the century, it was raised in price and prestige by canning and rail shipment, which is why it is treated here with a delicacy a cheap fish would not have received.