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Pepper (To lobster meat add yolks)
To lobster meat add yolks of eggs rubbed to a paste, parsley, sauce, and seasonings to taste. Fill lobster shells, cover with buttered crumbs, and bake until crumbs are brown.
A skeleton entry of the kind Farmer used for variations on a preceding dish: the proportions are left to the cook, and several terms assume knowledge the modern reader does not have. The hinge is that the lobster is already cooked before it goes into the shells — this is a browning of crumbs, not a cooking of shellfish.
- The yolks are hard-cooked"Yolks of eggs rubbed to a paste" means the yolks of hard-cooked eggs pressed through a sieve or mashed with a fork, often with a little butter. Raw yolks will not rub to a paste and would loosen the mixture rather than bind it.
- "Sauce" means white sauce"Sauce" is unspecified -- the recipe gives no indication of which sauce, and in a creamed shellfish filling of this period a thin or medium white sauce (butter, flour, milk) is the likeliest reading. Something in the region of half a cup will moisten the meat of a 1 1/2 to 2 lb lobster; the filling should mound, not pour.
- SeasoningsLeft wholly to the cook. Salt with cayenne or paprika, a little lemon juice, or a spoonful of sherry would all be at home in a dish of this date. The stray title "Pepper" looks like a cataloguing artifact rather than part of the recipe.
- Buttered crumbsMelted butter stirred through soft bread crumbs in roughly a 1:3 ratio by volume. Buttered crumbs brown more evenly than plain dry crumbs, which tend to scorch at the edges while staying pale in the middle.
- The shellsSplit the body shells lengthwise, clean them, and scrub the interior. Halved lobster bodies sit unsteadily — set them in a rimmed pan on crumpled foil or a bed of rock salt.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives no heat or timing, only "bake until crumbs are brown." In a modern oven a fairly hot setting for 10 to 15 minutes will brown the crumbs and heat the filling through. Longer dries the lobster, since it was already cooked when picked from the shell.
- YieldThe meat of one 1½ to 2 lb boiled lobster fills two half-shells and serves two as a first course, one as a light main dish.
Stuffed lobster shells belong to the late-nineteenth-century American habit of serving expensive shellfish back in its own carapace -- the same impulse behind scalloped oysters served in scallop shells. It was also plain economy: a boiled lobster yields a modest amount of meat, and extending it with sauce, egg and crumbs turned one lobster into a course for two or three. Over the nineteenth century New England lobster shifted from a cheap coastal food to a canned and shipped commodity with real cachet. An entry printed as a bare variation like this one assumes the reader has met white sauce and buttered crumbs earlier in the book.