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Crab or Lobster Cutlets
To the recipe for lobster croquettes add the yolk of one egg and one teaspoon of chopped parsley. Cool. Shape into cutlets and fry as croquettes.
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have already made the book's lobster croquette mixture, which is cooked shellfish bound with a very thick white sauce (a panada) and chilled until firm. Everything hinges on that binding being stiff enough to hold a shape in hot fat.
- The base you actually needThe original sends you back to the book's own lobster croquette mixture, which is not repeated here. Failing that, any stiffly bound croquette mixture will do: chopped cooked lobster or crab folded into a white sauce made thick enough that the mixture mounds on a spoon and does not slump.
- Why the extra yolkThe recipe does not say, but a yolk is a plausible extra binder for the flatter cutlet shape. Stir it in off the heat so it thickens rather than scrambles.
- "Cool" means coldSpread the mixture in a shallow pan and refrigerate at least 2 hours, ideally overnight. Warm or barely cool mixture will burst its coating and empty into the fat.
- Cutlet shapeForm flat, tapering ovals, thicker at one end. Some period recipes finish the narrow end with a short length of uncooked macaroni or a small trimmed bone to imitate a chop; it is decorative only and comes out before eating.
- "Fry as croquettes"Follow whatever the book's croquette recipe directs; typically egg and crumbs, and deep fat hot enough to colour the crust quickly. The filling is already cooked, so you are only setting the coating -- a few minutes is enough.
- Rest the coatingLet the breaded cutlets sit refrigerated 20 to 30 minutes before frying so the egg sets and grips. This does more for the finished shape than any amount of careful handling in the pan.
- Yield and servingYield depends entirely on how much of the croquette mixture you began with. Serve dressed: tartare, a thin béchamel, or drawn butter with lemon.
The Victorian and Edwardian "cutlet" was as much a shape as a dish. Kitchens routinely pressed bound mixtures of fish, shellfish, chicken or veal into the flat tapering outline of a lamb chop, sometimes finishing the point with a scrap of macaroni to stand in for the bone, and served them fanned around a dish with a paper frill. The convention is generally traced to the French service of the period, in which croquettes, croustades and cutlets are often said to have been graded by form as much as content, and it survived in American household books because it let a cook stretch an expensive ingredient -- lobster and crab both -- into a course that looked like it had cost more. That the instructions here amount to a single sentence pointing back at the croquette recipe is itself typical.