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Scalloped Lobster
To one pint of thin white sauce well seasoned with salt, pepper, cayenne and a little lemon juice, add one and one-half cup of flaked lobster meat and one-half cup of stale bread crumbs. Fill lobster shells or ramekins with the mixture, place buttered crumbs on top and brown in the oven. T
A straightforward creamed-lobster gratin from a 1911 general cookbook. The only real risks are overcooking already-cooked lobster and a sauce too thin to hold.
- Thin white sauceIn period usage this is generally about 1 tablespoon each butter and flour per cup of milk — pourable, not a thick binding sauce. For a pint that means roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 2 cups milk, cooked until it just coats a spoon.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; recipes of this date normally left oven heat to the cook's judgement. A modern oven at around 400°F works; the dish only needs the crumbs browned and the filling hot, about 12–15 minutes.
- The hingeThe lobster is already cooked. Everything else should be hot before it goes in the oven, so the fish is only warmed through — a long bake turns lobster stringy and squeaky.
- Flaked lobster meatA cup and a half is roughly the yield of one 1½–2 lb lobster, tail, claws and knuckles together. Tomalley and coral can be stirred in as well and will darken and enrich the sauce, though the recipe does not call for them.
- Stale bread crumbsSoft crumbs from day-old bread, not dried packaged crumbs, which will drink the sauce and go pasty. The half cup inside the mixture is there to give it body; the buttered crumbs on top are for the crust.
- Buttered crumbsToss about ½ cup crumbs with 1–2 tablespoons melted butter until they look damp but loose. Dry crumbs scattered over a wet filling will scorch at the edges and stay raw beneath.
- Serving vesselsLobster shells means the cleaned split carapace and body halves, set on a bed of coarse salt so they sit level. The mixture comes to roughly four cups, so allow four 8-oz ramekins or six smaller ones.
- YieldServes four as a first course, or two with bread and a salad.
Scalloped dishes — anything creamed, crumbed and browned in a shallow vessel — were a mainstay of American cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and lobster was one of the commonest fillings. The name is often traced to cooking and serving in scallop shells, though the derivation is disputed; by 1911 the shell was optional and the technique was the thing. That a mass-market book would treat lobster as an everyday chafing-dish and luncheon food is striking, since by then lobster was already a fashionable and comparatively expensive food. The recipe also shows the era's confidence in white sauce as a universal vehicle: sharpen it with cayenne and lemon, fold in almost any cooked flesh, crumb it, and brown it.