Lobster Farci
Two cups of lobster meat; three hard boiled eggs (yolks); one-half pint of milk; one-fourth of a nutmeg, grated; one tablespoon of chopped parsley; one tablespoon of butter; two tablespoons of bread crumbs; one tablespoon of flour; salt and pepper to taste. Cut the lobster into small pieces. Two lobsters will be required for this quantity. Put the milk on to boil in the double boiler, and when hot, stir into it the butter and flour, rubbed well together. Stir until smooth, and cook three minutes; then remove from the fire, and add the crumbs, parsley, lobster, salt and pepper, and the yolks of the eggs mashed very fine. Mix all well together. In opening the lobster for the stuffing, be careful not to break the body or tail shells. Wash them and wipe dry, and with a pair of scissors cut off the under part of the tail shells, using the tails of both lobsters. Join the large ends of the tail shells to the body shell, with the ends of the tails sticking out, thus forming a boat-shaped shell. Put the stuffing into this boat, brush over the top with beaten egg, sprinkle lightly with bread crumbs, and bake in a quick oven for fifteen minutes. LOBSTER À LA NEWBERG-See Chapter on Chafing-dish Recipes.
A Victorian stuffed-lobster gratin: a thick béchamel bound with hard-boiled yolks, packed back into the shells and browned. The recipe assumes you already have cooked lobster and know how to open it neatly.
- The hinge: keep the shells intactEverything about the presentation depends on splitting the lobsters cleanly so the body carapace and tail shells survive whole. Cook the lobsters first, work along the underside with kitchen shears, and lift the meat out rather than cracking the shell open. If a shell breaks, bake the mixture in a shallow gratin dish instead; nothing is lost but the boat.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. With a tablespoon each of butter and flour that gives a fairly loose sauce, which is intended: the crumbs and mashed yolks do most of the thickening once they go in.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. Fifteen minutes at that heat sets the top and browns the crumbs without drying the already-cooked lobster. The filling only needs to be heated through.
- How much lobsterTwo cups of picked meat. The text says two lobsters will be required for this quantity, though it does not say what size. Buying pre-picked meat is fine for the filling but leaves you without shells.
- A quarter of a nutmegRoughly 1/2 to 3/4 teaspoon freshly grated, which is assertive by current taste. Half that amount suits most palates; nutmeg turns up often with shellfish in cream in recipes of this period.
- Double boilerGentle heat keeps a milk sauce from scorching on a coal range. A heavy saucepan over low heat works, whisked steadily; the three minutes the recipe gives is about enough to cook out the raw flour taste.
- The egg yolksHard-boiled yolks mashed fine act as a binder and give the filling a granular richness. Push them through a sieve rather than mashing with a fork for an even texture.
- YieldRoughly four as a first course, or two as a main dish with bread and a green salad.
Farci is simply French for "stuffed," and the dish belongs to the era when American cookbooks reached for French kitchen vocabulary to dress up domestic cooking. Filling a lobster shell with the chopped meat bound in a cream sauce is a close relative of the French homard farci and a cousin of lobster thermidor, another restaurant dish of the period. The pattern of the recipe u2014 a small quantity of expensive protein extended with milk, flour, breadcrumbs and hard-boiled egg, then returned to its own shell for effect u2014 is characteristic of turn-of-the-century middle-class entertaining, where the visual presentation was expected to do work that the ingredient budget could not. The recipe closes with a cross-reference to Lobster u00e0 la Newberg in the chafing-dish chapter, which places lobster in cream alongside the informal supper and luncheon cookery of that chapter.