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Live Lobster en Brochette
Split a live lobster, remove meat from tail and large claws, cut in pieces, and arrange on skewers, alternating pieces with small slices of bacon. Fry in deep fat and drain. Cook liver of lobster with one tablespoon butter three minutes, season highly with mustard and cayenne, and serve with lobster.
Lobster à l'Américaine Split a live lobster and put in a large omelet pan, sprinkle with one-fourth onion finely chopped and a few grains of cayenne and cook five minutes. Add one-half cup Tomato Sauce II and cook three minutes; then add two tablespoons Sherry wine, cover, and cook in oven seven minutes. To the liver add one tablespoon wine, two tablespoons Tomato Sauce, and one-half tablespoon melted butter; heat in pan after lobster has been removed. As soon as sauce is heated, strain, and pour over lobster.
Two related lobster preparations, both written for a cook who is expected to buy the lobster alive and break it down at the stove. The instructions assume knowledge the book gives elsewhere, so a few gaps need filling.
- Killing the lobster"Split a live lobster" means driving a heavy knife point-first through the head, just behind the eyes, then cutting forward and down before halving the body lengthwise. Chilling the lobster in the freezer for 15-20 minutes first makes it sluggish and the job cleaner.
- The tomalleyThe "liver" is the tomalley, the soft green mass in the body cavity. Health advisories have at times warned against eating it, since it can concentrate cadmium and any paralytic shellfish poisoning toxins the animal has taken up; check current local guidance. Both sauces here are built on it; discarding it and finishing the pan sauce with butter and a little stock costs the dish very little.
- Deep fat temperatureThe book gives no number. 375F is right for skewered shellfish: hot enough to set the surface in two to three minutes, before the tail meat tightens and dries.
- Bacon and lobster cook at different ratesRaw bacon will not render in the time raw lobster needs. Lay the slices out and part-cook them until the fat has just turned translucent, then thread them between the lobster pieces.
- Skewers"En brochette" here means metal skewers. Wooden ones need a 30-minute soak, and even then they scorch in deep fat.
- "Omelet pan"Not a modern non-stick crepe pan but a heavy shallow pan with sloping sides, wide enough to hold a split lobster flat and able to go from burner to oven. A 12-inch cast-iron or steel skillet is the equivalent.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given for the seven-minute finish. A hot oven, 400-425F, is what the timing implies; lower than that and the lobster is merely warming rather than cooking through.
- Tomato Sauce IIA cross-reference to the sauce chapter: a cooked, strained and thickened tomato sauce rather than a raw puree. Any smooth, reduced tomato sauce of pouring consistency will stand in.
- YieldOne lobster of about a pound and a half serves one generously or two as a first course. Both dishes want plain bread and nothing else competing with them.
Fannie Farmer's 1896 book was written for a Boston audience that could buy lobster cheaply off the wharves. The second recipe carries one of the most argued-over names in French cooking: homard a l'americaine is generally traced to a Parisian restaurant of the 1860s, where a chef is said to have improvised a dish of lobster with tomato, onion, wine and cayenne for late diners and named it for his American guests. A rival account holds that the true name is a l'armoricaine, after Armorica, the old name for Brittany, and that the American attribution is a corruption. That Farmer includes it at all, alongside a plain skewered-and-fried preparation, shows how quickly French restaurant dishes were reaching the American cooking-school curriculum in the 1890s.