Lobster
O BOIL LOBSTER-To boil a live lobster, fill the kettle with water and when this is warm place the fish in it head downward. Add one tablespoon of salt, cover the kettle and place it on a quick fire. A medium-sized lobster will cook in about twenty minutes. Plunge in cold water when done, and when cool enough to handle take the meat from the shell as follows: First break off the claws and remove the tail. Then split the body through the center and take out the soft, green, creamy mass which constitutes the liver, and the coral, saving both. The stomach is under the head and this is thrown away. Cut the tail shell open and take out its meat in one piece. Split this meat open and the intestinal canal which runs its entire length will be found. This canal, the stomach and the spongy portions between the body and shell are not used. Crack all the claws and remove their meat. In cutting up the meat of cooked lobster always use a silver knife, if possible, as a steel knife discolors or darkens the meat.
A clear set of butchering directions attached to a cooking method that modern kitchens have largely abandoned. The dismantling instructions still hold; the boil itself needs rethinking.
- Start hot, not warmPlacing the lobster in warm water and bringing it up slowly is the one instruction to discard. Current practice is a hard rolling boil so the animal is killed quickly; many cooks first chill the lobster for 20 minutes in the freezer, or split the head lengthwise through the cross-mark behind the eyes, before immersion.
- TimingTwenty minutes will overcook anything short of a three-pounder into cotton. Figure roughly 8 minutes for a 1 lb lobster, 10 to 12 for 1½ lb, 15 for 2 lb, counted from the return to the boil. The shell turns red well before the meat is done, so it is no guide.
- "A quick fire"Period shorthand for the hottest part of the range — the highest burner setting. The water should not stop boiling when the lobster goes in, which means a large pot and only one or two lobsters at a time.
- The saltOne tablespoon is little for a full kettle. Lobster is a saltwater animal and is usually cooked in heavily salted water; about ¼ cup of salt per gallon is a common recommendation, though that is still short of true seawater strength. Clean seawater also works if you are near it.
- Tomalley and coralThe "soft, green, creamy mass" is the tomalley (hepatopancreas) and the coral is the roe of a female. Both were prized for sauces and butters. Note that the tomalley concentrates cadmium and marine biotoxins, and health agencies have periodically advised against eating it; the tail and claw meat are unaffected.
- Silver versus steelThe warning is real but dated. Carbon-steel blades of the period reacted with the meat and left grey streaks; modern stainless steel does not, so any sharp knife will do.
- The cold plungeUseful if the meat is going into a salad or a cold dish, since it halts carryover cooking. If you mean to serve the lobster hot with butter, skip it and drain the lobster head-down instead.
- YieldA 1¼ lb hard-shell lobster gives roughly 4 to 5 oz of picked meat — plan on one lobster per person served whole, or two lobsters for a salad or newburg for four.
Butterick's readers were being taught to handle a shellfish that had, within living memory, changed social station entirely. Through the early nineteenth century lobster was abundant along the northeastern American coast, and accounts, often repeated though hard to document in detail, describe it being fed to prisoners, servants and livestock, and gathered by hand from tide pools. Canning from the 1840s onward, then rail transport of live lobsters packed in seaweed, turned it into a hotel and dining-car luxury by the time this book appeared. That shift may explain the tone here: the instructions are written for a household that could now buy a live lobster but had no inherited knowledge of what to do with it, hence the careful anatomy lesson about the stomach, the intestinal vein and the "spongy portions" — the gills. The insistence on a silver knife belongs to the same era, when carbon-steel blades discoloured delicate or acidic foods, and silver fruit and fish knives were common in well-furnished households.