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Devilled Lobster
One pint of lobster; one cup of bread crumbs; two hard boiled eggs; one-half lemon; one pint of cream sauce. Cook the lobster for ten minutes in a little water, then drain, and when cold cut into dice. Add the bread crumbs, the egg chopped very fine and the juice of the lemon. For seasoning use generously of salt and cayenne pepper and a grating of nutmeg. Add enough of the cream sauce (see Sauces for Fish, etc.) to make a paste. Fill scallop shells with the mixture, smooth the tops, sprinkle with bread crumbs and brown in a very hot oven.
A late-Victorian scallop-shell dish: cooked lobster bound with a thick cream sauce, seasoned hot with cayenne and nutmeg, and browned in shells. The whole thing hangs on the sauce being thick enough to hold a paste rather than a soup.
- A pint of lobsterShellfish here is measured by volume of picked meat, not by weight. A pint of diced lobster is roughly 12 to 14 oz, which means three or so 1 1/4 lb hard-shell lobsters, or six good tails.
- The ten-minute cookingSince a pint of lobster is a measure of picked meat, the ten minutes may well be applied to meat already boiled and shelled. Lobster cooked a second time for a full ten minutes turns fibrous and squeaky; a minute or two off the heat in hot water is enough to warm it through.
- Cream sauceThe recipe sends you to the book's own Sauces for Fish; a cream sauce of this period is typically a white roux sauce made with cream, sometimes let down with fish stock. Make it thick, at the consistency of a soft paste, since a thin sauce will weep in the oven and slide out of the shells.
- A very hot ovenRead this as 450 to 475F, or better, run it under the broiler. The filling is already cooked; the only job left is to colour the crumb top, and a long bake will only dry the lobster.
- Scallop shellsDeep sea-scallop shells were standard kitchen equipment and are still sold as ovenware. Individual gratin dishes or 4 oz ramekins hold about the same, roughly a scant 1/2 cup each.
- Cayenne and nutmeg"Devilled" in this period means hard hot seasoning — cayenne, mustard or pepper — and cayenne is what is called for here; the recipe says generously, so err well above a pinch. The grating of nutmeg is doing the same work it does in a cream sauce.
- Bread crumbsThese are dry crumbs from stale bread, finer and drier than panko. A cup of them absorbs a good deal of sauce, so hold back some of the cream sauce and add it until the mixture just holds together.
- YieldFills six or more scallop shells as a first course, or four to six as a light main with bread and a salad. Assemble ahead and refrigerate, but bring to room temperature before browning.
Devilling — chopping cooked meat or fish, seasoning it hard with cayenne, mustard or pepper, and browning it — was an eighteenth-century British trick for using up cold roast and cold fish, and it survived into American cookery as a way of stretching an expensive ingredient. That is plainly what is happening here: a pint of lobster is padded out with crumbs, chopped egg and a pint of cream sauce to fill six shells. The scallop-shell presentation belongs to the same period habit of serving fish in individual portions at the start of a meal. Lobster in the early 1900s was no longer the cheap coastal food it had been a century earlier, but it was still far more affordable than it is now, and canned lobster meat — which would work perfectly well in this recipe — was widely sold. The pairing of cayenne with nutmeg is characteristic of the era's fish cookery.