Stewed Lobster
Cut the meat fine and put it in a small frying-pan with milk enough to nearly cover it; when the milk boils, make into a cream with a little cornstarch wet with milk, seasoning with salt, pepper and butter. Serve on toasted bread laid on a hot platter.
A creamed lobster on toast, written for cooks who already knew lobster and needed only the proportions. The whole dish takes about ten minutes once the meat is picked.
- The hinge: heat, don't cookThe lobster here is presumably already cooked, whether picked from a boiled lobster or taken from a can, so it needs only to warm through in the milk. Held at a simmer while the sauce thickens and reduces, it turns fibrous and squeaky.
- How much lobsterThe recipe gives no quantity. The meat of one 1 1/2 lb lobster, roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups chopped, serves two on toast. Milk "enough to nearly cover" comes to about 1 cup for that amount.
- "Small frying-pan"A shallow skillet, used because the wide surface heats the milk fast. A small saucepan works as well and is less likely to scorch the milk at the edges.
- The cornstarchAbout 1 tablespoon cornstarch slaked in 2 tablespoons cold milk will thicken a cup of milk to a pouring cream. Stir it in off the boil, then return to a bare simmer for a minute so the starch loses its raw taste.
- Butter as seasoningThe recipe adds butter with the salt and pepper as the cream is made; adding it at the end, off the heat, keeps it for gloss and richness rather than treating it as a cooking fat. A tablespoon is plenty; more will break out of the sauce.
- Canned lobsterCanned lobster was widely available and would serve here as well as fresh. Canned may be saltier, so taste before salting, whichever you use.
- The toastCut thick and toast dry and firm. Milk sauce on thin toast collapses to paste before it reaches the table.
- Worth addingA grating of nutmeg, a spoonful of dry sherry, or cayenne in place of black pepper are all consistent with how this dish was seasoned in the same period, if the plain version reads flat to you.
Creamed lobster on toast is the kind of quick hot supper dish associated with the chafing-dish era, though this version is written for a frying-pan. Its presence in a Butterick volume is telling: the company sold dress patterns and published The Delineator, and its cook book was aimed at the same readership of home-managing women rather than at professional cooks. Lobster was affordable and widely canned by the turn of the twentieth century, having shed its earlier reputation as cheap coastal food without yet reaching its modern price, and lobster dishes of this kind, along with lobster Newburg and lobster cutlets, are common in American general cook books of the period. The construction is a plain white sauce built directly around the meat, thickened with cornstarch rather than a flour roux.