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Fricassee of Lobster and Mushrooms
2 lb. lobster 1/4 cup butter ¾ lb. mushrooms Few drops onion juice 2 tablespoons Sherry wine 1/4 cup flour 1½ cups milk
What survives here is the ingredient list only iption;, the method having been lost in transcription — so read this as a shopping list for a classic white-sauce fricassee rather than a set of directions. Two of the quantities are also mangled in the original printing and need judgement.
- "34 lb. mushrooms"This is a printing error. 3/4 lb. is the most likely reading, and balances a 2 lb. lobster; 1/4 lb. would also be plausible. The original is genuinely ambiguous.
- The butter and flour are a roux1/4 cup butter to 1/4 cup flour to 1 1/2 cups milk gives a thick white sauce, meant to bind rather than pour. Cook the flour in the butter two or three minutes before the milk goes in or the sauce tastes pasty.
- Cook the lobster first, then barely reheat itA 2 lb. lobster yields roughly 1 1/2 cups of picked meat. It is already cooked when you pick it; folding it into hot sauce for a minute or two is all it wants. Simmering it in the sauce turns the tail cottony.
- Onion juiceA period seasoning made by grating a halved onion on a fine grater and using the liquid that collects, or by pressing grated onion in a cloth. A few drops is a tiny amount — it is there for background, not onion flavour.
- SherryAdd it off the heat at the end. Two tablespoons cooked into the sauce loses most of what you paid for; dry or medium sherry, not cooking sherry, which is salted.
- MushroomsSauté them separately in a little of the butter until their water has driven off, then add to the sauce. Dropped in raw they thin the sauce and stay grey.
- SeasoningThe list gives none. Salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg or cayenne suit a sauce of this kind; the dish is flat without salt.
- ServingEnough for four as a first course or on toast, three as a main. Fricassees of this kind were served in patty shells, on toast points, or in scallop shells with crumbs browned on top.
A fricassee, in nineteenth-century American usage, meant meat or fish cut up and finished in a sauce rather than roasted whole — the name is usually derived from the French fricasser, though the etymology is not settled. By the time Fannie Farmer was teaching at the Boston Cooking School in the 1890s the word covered a wide range of dishes bound in a white sauce, which is what this is: lobster meat and mushrooms in a thick milk béchamel, lifted with sherry and onion juice. Lobster was relatively cheap and abundant along the New England coast for much of the nineteenth century, though prices were rising by its end, and Boston cookbooks of the period treat it as an ingredient to be stretched with sauce and served on toast, in croquettes, or in patty shells — unlike its modern position as a luxury served plain with drawn butter. Cultivated mushrooms were a comparatively new commercial crop in America at the time, which may be why they earn a place in the title.