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Lobster Patties
Follow directions for the filling of chicken patties, substituting lobster for chicken.
This is a cross-reference rather than a standalone recipe: the book expects you to turn back to its chicken patty filling and swap in lobster. The substitution is not quite one-for-one, and a few period assumptions need spelling out.
- What a "patty" wasIn books of this kind a patty is usually a small round case of puff pastry — a miniature vol-au-vent — baked hollow and filled shortly before serving. Frozen puff pastry shells, or a rolled and cut round with a lid, do the same job; the filling is generally added after baking rather than cooked inside the case.
- The filling underneathFillings of this type are typically a thick white sauce, butter and flour cooked together and thinned with milk or cream and stock, with the meat stirred in. It needs to be stiff rather than pourable, or the pastry softens quickly.
- Lobster is not chickenLobster comes to the pan already cooked, so add it at the end and only heat it through — two or three minutes. Held longer in a simmering sauce it turns fibrous.
- How much meatReckon on a cup or so of picked lobster meat for six to eight small patties; a 1 1/4 lb lobster yields roughly three-quarters of a cup. Cut it into small pieces rather than shredding it.
- Coral and tomalleyCooks of the period prized the coral (the roe of a hen lobster) rubbed through a sieve into the sauce for colour and flavour. It is entirely optional now, and the green tomalley is usually discarded, as it concentrates contaminants from the animal's environment.
- Canned lobsterCanned lobster was a common source for readers of such books. Good frozen lobster meat is the modern equivalent; drain it well and pat it dry, or the sauce thins as it warms.
- SeasoningLobster in a cream sauce needs more than salt. Cayenne, a scrape of nutmeg or mace, lemon juice and a spoonful of sherry are all period-correct and all pull the dish out of blandness.
- Warming the casesCrisp the baked shells in a 350F oven for five minutes and fill them at the table's edge. Filled and left standing, they go soft.
Patties of this kind descend from the French vol-au-vent and its small cousin the bouchée. Nineteenth-century American cookery treated them as an entrée, a small hot dish served between fish and roast, showy but made largely from something already cooked. Recipes like this one commonly sat among made-over dishes, the section that turned yesterday's remains, or a can from the pantry shelf, into a course that looked deliberate. Canning had brought lobster within reach of ordinary middle-class kitchens by the 1880s and 1890s, and a household manual of the period could assume many readers had a tin of it to hand. The bare instruction to "substitute lobster for chicken" also reflects how these books were built: filling, sauce and pastry were treated as modular, and a good cook was expected to recombine them without being walked through it twice.