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Lobsters, Crayfish, Prawns, and Shrimps
188. To BOIL. Put them into a pot of boiling water; the lobsters must not remain any longer than fifteen or twenty minutes, unless very large indeed. From the shells and small claws bruised will be extracted a juice that will much improve the sauce. When cold, split the tail down the middle, and crack the claws, for which purpose nothing serves so well as the chink at the hinge of a back-kitchen door. Place the body in the middle, half a tail on each side, and the large claws top and bottom. 189. TO ROAST.-After boiling the lobster, take it out of the shell, and while hot rub it with butter, and lay it before the fire. Continue basting it with butter till it has a fine froth; then serve. 190. TO STEW. -Pick the lobster, put the berries into a pan in a warm bath, and rub them down with a bit of butter, two spoonsful of any sort of gravy, one of soy, or walnut ketchup, a little salt and cayenne, and a spoonful of port; stew the lobster cut into bits with the gravy as above. 191. To Pot. - Half boil them, pick out the meat, cut into small bits, season with mace, white pepper, nutmeg, and salt, press close into a pot and cover with butter, bake half an hour; put the spawn in. When cold, take the lobster out, and put it into the pots with a little
Four short methods for one animal: boiled, roasted before the fire, stewed in its own coral, and potted under butter. The boiling time is the number to change first.
- Boiling timeFifteen to twenty minutes will overcook a modern market lobster. A 1 to 1 1/2 lb lobster needs about 8-10 minutes from the moment the water returns to the boil, a 2 lb lobster about 12-15. Overcooked tail meat turns cottony and will not improve in any of the three dishes that follow.
- Killing and salting the waterThe original assumes a live lobster going straight into the pot. Current humane practice is to chill the lobster for 20 minutes in the freezer and then split the head through the cross mark behind the eyes before cooking, or to have the fishmonger do it. Salt the water heavily, roughly 35 g per litre, so it tastes of the sea.
- "Berries" and "spawn"Both mean the roe: the dark green coral of a hen lobster, which turns coral-red on cooking. The soft green tomalley from the body cavity is used the same way as a thickener and flavouring. Modern advice is to eat tomalley sparingly, as it concentrates contaminants from the animal's liver.
- The stewing panA "warm bath" here means a water bath: set the pan in, or over, barely simmering water rather than on direct heat. The point is to melt the roe into the butter without letting it seize or scramble, which is what happens over a direct flame.
- Soy and walnut ketchupThe soy bottled and sold in Britain at this date was a dark, salty sauce, and Chinese dark soy is probably closer to it than Japanese shoyu. Walnut ketchup is a spiced vinegar condiment still made commercially in Britain; mushroom ketchup or a spoonful of Worcestershire sauce stands in tolerably. Season at the end, as both are salty and the lobster already is.
- Roasting before the fireThere is no roasting here in the modern sense. Set the shelled, buttered meat under a hot grill or broiler for 2-3 minutes, basting once or twice, only until the butter foams and colours. Any longer and the meat, already fully cooked, tightens.
- Oven for pottingThe recipe gives no oven heat. A moderate oven, 325-350F/165-175C, suits a covered pot of buttered meat. Half an hour is for the flavours and the butter, not for cooking the lobster, which was half boiled first.
- Potted lobster keeps badlyThe butter seal was the refrigeration of its day and is not one now. Potted shellfish sealed under fat is an oxygen-free environment; keep it refrigerated at all times and eat it within three or four days, and do not treat the butter cap as a licence to store it in a larder.
- YieldA 1 1/2 lb lobster gives roughly 6 oz of picked meat, enough for two as a first course. The stew and the potted version each want the meat of two lobsters to make a worthwhile quantity.
The British Cookery Book was a mid-Victorian compilation, assembled from contributed household receipts rather than written by one hand, which is why these four methods sit together with no linking commentary and no quantities in three of them. Lobster from the inshore fishery reached London and the coastal towns in quantity, and potting was one of the usual ways of carrying it inland before ice and rail made fresh distribution routine. Potting itself is one of the oldest English preserving techniques, spiced meat or fish packed hard into a pot and sealed with clarified butter, and the seasonings named here, mace, nutmeg and white pepper, are the conventional potting spices used for everything from beef to char. The detail about cracking claws in the hinge of the back-kitchen door suggests a book written for households that had a back kitchen.