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Baked Live Lobster
Prepare as for broiling. Lay the lobster in a baking-pan, shell side down, season with salt, pepper and butter. Bake about forty minutes in a hot oven, basting it twice with melted butter.
A one-line recipe that assumes you already know the fishmonger's work and the broiling method it refers back to. The two things worth knowing are what "prepare as for broiling" involves and how badly the timing has aged.
- The timing is the hingeForty minutes will overcook lobster meat badly. A split lobster of 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb needs roughly 12-18 minutes in a hot oven; the meat is done when it is opaque and firm and pulls cleanly from the shell. The long bake may reflect heavier lobsters and less predictable oven heat, though the recipe says nothing about size.
- "A hot oven"Conventionally read today as about 425-450F. Most wood and coal ranges of the period had no thermometer, and cooks judged heat by tests such as how quickly a sprinkling of flour browned; the exact benchmark varied from book to book.
- "Prepare as for broiling"Split the lobster lengthwise through the head and down the body, lay it flat, and remove the gritty stomach sac just behind the eyes and the dark intestinal vein running the length of the tail. Crack the claws so heat gets in and so the meat can be pulled out at table.
- Dispatching itThe standard method is to drive a heavy knife point-down through the head just behind the eyes, then split forward and back. Chilling the lobster in the freezer for 15-20 minutes first makes it sluggish and easier to handle.
- Tomalley and coralThe green tomalley (liver) and, in a female, the dark roe that turns red on cooking were both regarded as delicacies here and left in place. Tomalley concentrates contaminants and current advice from several state health agencies is to limit or avoid eating it; the roe is not affected.
- Seasoning and bastingSeason the cut meat generously and dot it heavily with butter before it goes in, since there is no liquid in the pan. Two bastings over a short bake is about right, and any butter collected in the shell is the sauce.
- YieldOne lobster per person if it is the main course. Nothing else is needed but lemon, more melted butter, and bread.
Baking a split lobster rather than boiling it whole was, in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth century, often taken as a sign of a fresh, live lobster treated as a hot dish rather than a cold salad ingredient. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book to the same middle-class household audience, and its fish chapter presumes access to a market selling live lobster, something the growing rail and ice trade is generally credited with making ordinary in eastern cities around the turn of the century. The insistence on "live" is practical rather than showy: lobster is said to spoil very quickly after death, its flesh softening soon after, which is why the trade sold it swimming and why nineteenth-century recipes so often specify the condition in the title. The direction to "prepare as for broiling" is typical of the book's compression.