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Salt (Clean and parboil oysters)
Clean and parboil oysters; drain, and add to liquor body bones and tough claw meat from lobster, water, celery, and onion. Cook slowly until stock is reduced to one cup, and strain. Make sauce of butter, flour, strained stock, and cream. Add oysters and lobster meat cut in strips; then add seasonings. One-half teaspoon beef extract is an improvement to this dish.
This is the method half of a Fannie Farmer recipe; the ingredient list that carried the quantities has been separated from it, so the amounts for butter, flour, cream, water, celery and onion are not recoverable from the text as printed. The technique, though, is complete and worth following.
- The hinge: barely cook the oysters"Parboil" here means bringing the oysters just to the point where the edges ruffle, about one to two minutes, then draining at once. They finish in the hot sauce. Oysters held at a simmer for more than a couple of minutes turn firm and rubbery and shed water into the sauce.
- Save the liquorThe liquid the oysters give up is the backbone of the stock. Strain it through a fine sieve or a coffee filter to catch shell grit, then combine it with the lobster shells and vegetables.
- "Body bones"Not bones at all: the cartilaginous body shell and thin inner plates of the lobster, plus the small legs and tough scraps. Crack them so the water reaches the interior. This is a shell stock; a gentle simmer draws out most of the flavour fairly quickly, and the recipe's real stopping point is the reduction to one cup rather than a set time.
- Reduce to one cupApart from the half teaspoon of beef extract, this is the only quantity the printed method gives, and it fixes the strength of the dish. Reduce uncovered at a bare simmer rather than a boil to keep the stock clear.
- Sauce proportionsFarmer's ordinary white sauce runs about 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to a cup of liquid, with thinner and thicker versions using less or more. With one cup of stock plus cream, 2 tablespoons of each will give a sauce that coats the shellfish rather than soups it.
- Beef extractA commercial meat glaze of the Liebig or Bovril type, sold in small jars and common in period kitchens. A half teaspoon of any concentrated beef base or a spoonful of demi-glace does the same job: it deepens the shellfish stock without tasting of beef.
- SeasoningsThe original leaves these open. Salt and white pepper are the baseline; a little paprika or cayenne, and sometimes sherry stirred in off the heat, appear in comparable period shellfish dishes. Season after the cream goes in; reduced oyster liquor is already salty.
Fannie Merritt Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) devoted a long section to shellfish, and Farmer's project throughout was teaching thrift through method. This dish is a case study in it: the lobster's tail and claw meat go into the sauce, while the body shell, the small legs and the tough scraps are boiled down into the cup of stock that flavors it. Dishes combining lobster with oysters belong to the New England chafing-dish and "made dish" cookery of the period, the same broad family as oyster Wiggle and lobster Newburg (the latter a Delmonico's, New York, creation). Concentrated meat extracts were industrialized in the second half of the nineteenth century and sold under brand names such as Liebig's and Bovril by the 1880s, and were regarded as a modern convenience for building depth into a sauce.