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Lobster Cutlets
2 cups chopped lobster meat 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Few gratings nutmeg 1 teaspoon lemon juice Yolk 1 egg 1 teaspoon finely chopped parsley 1 cup Thick White Sauce Mix ingredients in order given, and cool. Shape in form of cutlets, crumb, and fry same as croquettes. Make a cut at small end of eack cutlet, and insert in each the tip end of a small claw. Stack around a mound of parsley. Serve with
A croquette mixture in disguise: lobster bound with a very stiff white sauce, chilled hard, shaped, breaded and deep-fried. Nearly all the success is in the chilling.
- Thick White SauceThe thick white sauce used for binding croquette mixtures carries about twice the roux of an ordinary white sauce, on the order of 4 tablespoons each of butter and flour to 1 cup of milk, and sets very firm when cold. Anything looser and the cutlets are likely to burst in the fat.
- Chill properly"cool" here means chilled until the mass is firm and sliceable, which in practice takes several hours in the ice-box. A mixture still warm is a frequent cause of croquettes coming apart in the fat.
- How much lobsterTwo cups of picked meat is roughly 10 to 12 oz, which is the yield of two to three 1 1/4-lb lobsters. Chop it, do not mince it to paste; the texture is the point of the dish.
- "Crumb" means the full three-stage coatingIn this book, to crumb is to roll in fine dry crumbs, then in egg beaten with a tablespoon of water, then in crumbs again. Letting the coated cutlets rest before frying helps the crust set, though the recipe does not say to.
- Fry same as croquettesDeep fat, enough to float them, a few at a time so the temperature holds. The book's own test is a bread cube browning in about forty seconds, which corresponds to roughly 375-390F on a modern thermometer. They need only about two minutes — everything inside is already cooked and the aim is a set crust, not further cooking of the lobster, which turns fibrous.
- The claw tipsReserve the small claws when picking the lobsters. The tips are pushed into the narrow end after frying to imitate the bone of a veal or lamb cutlet, whose shape gives the dish its name.
- The text breaks offThe original ends mid-sentence at "Serve with". What was named cannot be recovered from this page; a white or cream sauce, Bechamel, or a tartar sauce would all be in keeping.
- YieldEnough for about eight cutlets, serving four as an entrée course or three as a light main dish.
Cutlets of this kind belong to the late-nineteenth-century fashion for shaping soft, creamy mixtures into the silhouette of something grander — a lamb or veal cutlet, complete with a false "bone." Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School book is full of them, and the entree section in particular reflects a household aspiring to serve courses in the French manner without a French kitchen staff. Lobster made sense for this treatment in Boston, where New England lobster was close at hand. The croquette technique itself — a panade or thick sauce used to bind chopped cooked meat, then crumbed and fried — is generally traced to French cookery, and by Farmer's day it was a familiar American way of turning leftovers or a small amount of expensive protein into a full course.