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Lobster Farci
1 cup chopped lobster meat Yolks 2 "hard-boiled" eggs ½ tablespoon chopped parsley Slight grating nutmeg 1/3 cup buttered crumbs
What survives here is the ingredient list only — the printed page gives no method, no oven heat and no yield. The proportions are workable, but a cook using them is reconstructing the dish rather than following it.
- Farci means stuffedThe mixture was presumably packed back into the cleaned half-shells and browned rather than baked in a dish, though the page gives no method. Two halves from a single lobster would hold roughly this quantity.
- No binder is listedChopped lobster, sieved yolks, parsley and nutmeg will not hold together on their own. Contemporary versions of the same dish bind the meat with a few tablespoons of thick white sauce or melted butter before the crumbs go on top; without something of the kind the filling will be dry and loose.
- Buttered crumbsIn books of this kind a standing preparation defined elsewhere: soft stale bread crumbs tossed in melted butter. Their position last in the list suggests a topping rather than something mixed through.
- Yolks 2 "hard-boiled" eggsPress them through a sieve rather than chopping; they act as a dry binder and thicken the mixture. The quotation marks around "hard-boiled" most likely reflect the period convention that such eggs should be cooked gently below the boil rather than actually boiled.
- Lobster quantityOne cup of chopped meat is about what you get from a single 1½ to 2 lb lobster, claws included. Buy it already cooked if you prefer; the meat here needs no further cooking, only heating through.
- Heat and timeNo cooking method is given. If the aim is to brown the crumbs, a hot oven of around 400F for 10 to 12 minutes, or 2 to 3 minutes under the broiler, will do it. Long baking makes lobster meat stringy and squeaky.
- Nutmeg"Slight grating" is meant literally: a few strokes on a fine grater for the whole cup. Nutmeg was a common seasoning with shellfish and cream in this period and turns unpleasant in quantity.
- ServingNo yield is given; two stuffed half-shells would make one main course or two first courses, with lemon.
Farci is simply the French for stuffed, and its appearance in Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book reflects how thoroughly late-nineteenth-century American cooking schools borrowed French vocabulary for dishes that were, at bottom, thrifty ways of stretching an expensive protein. Serving a mixture back in its own shell — lobster, crab, or scallop — was a hallmark of that style, giving a small amount of meat the presence of a whole one. That the page preserves only a list of ingredients is a reminder of how these books were built: standard preparations such as buttered crumbs and thick white sauce were defined once, early on, and thereafter assumed.