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Lobster Patties
Cut into small pieces tail part, two boiled lobsters. Season well with pepper, salt and a little lemon juice. Dissolve two tablespoons cornstarch in a little cold milk, and turn into one pint of boiling milk. After it has thickened add butter and cook until quite thick.
Stir lobster into this mixture and heat through. Fill patty shells which have been heated.
A plain white-sauce lobster filling, thickened with cornstarch rather than a flour roux. The whole dish stands or falls on not overcooking the lobster once it goes into the hot sauce.
- Lobster quantityTwo boiled lobsters yield a fairly modest amount of tail meat; a 1 to 1 1/4 lb lobster gives only a few ounces of picked meat in all, and the tail is only part of that. For a pint of sauce, buy 8-10 oz cooked lobster meat, and use the claw meat in the filling as well rather than discarding it.
- Heat the lobster only throughThe lobster is already cooked. Fold it into the finished sauce off direct heat and warm it for a minute or two at most; held at a simmer it turns stringy and squeaky, and the sweetness goes.
- Cornstarch, not flourTwo tablespoons cornstarch to a pint of milk gives a very stiff sauce, closer to a pastry-cream consistency than a pouring sauce. That is deliberate, so the filling sits in the shell without weeping. Slurry the cornstarch with about 1/4 cup cold milk and whisk it into the boiling milk.
- Cook it out, then stopCornstarch thickens fully within a minute of boiling and thins again if boiled hard or long, and acid degrades it further. Bring it just back to a boil, hold 1 minute, then add butter (about 2 tablespoons) off the heat.
- Lemon juice timingSeason the lobster with the lemon as written, but add the seasoned lobster to the sauce at the end rather than acidulating the milk itself, which risks curdling and slackening.
- Patty shellsThese were baked puff-pastry vol-au-vent cases. Frozen puff pastry shells, baked and dried out in a 400F oven, are the direct equivalent; warm them just before filling so the pastry stays crisp.
- YieldEnough for 6 to 8 standard patty shells, serving 4 as a lunch dish or 6 to 8 as a first course. Fill at the last moment.
Lobster patties belong to the long Anglo-American vogue for creamed shellfish in pastry, a genteel way of stretching an expensive ingredient with a pint of milk and serving it hot at a luncheon or supper table. The patty shell is often linked to the French vol-au-vent, though English pastry "patties" are attested earlier and may have developed independently, and by the late nineteenth century American cookbooks treated "patties" as a standing format that any minced meat, sweetbread or shellfish could be poured into. Cornstarch here in place of flour is a period marker: commercially milled corn starch had become a cheap pantry staple in the United States after the mid-1800s.