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Baked Lobsters
Place a live lobster in boiling fish broth; when it is cooked, drain and split it in half lengthwise, pick the meat out of the tail and claws, cut it in small pieces, and mix in an equal quantity of mushrooms, also cut in dice. Place the coral of the lobster in a mortar with a little butter, pound, and pass it through a fine hair sieve. Put a few tablespoonfuls of bechamel sauce in a stewpan with a little cream and melted glaze, stir over the fire until it is well reduced, then mix with it the pieces of lobster and mushrooms, sprinkle in a little cayenne, and add the pounded coral. Clean the two shells of the lobster, fill them with the preparation, sprinkle bread crumbs on the top, pour a little warmed butter over each, and brown in the oven. Place a folded napkin on a dish, lay the shells on it, and serve at once.
Oscar's method is a lobster Thermidor in all but name, and it depends on two things: not overcooking the lobster the first time, since it goes back into the oven, and reducing the sauce until it will cling rather than run out of the shell.
- The hinge: cook the lobster shortThe meat is heated twice. Boil a 1 1/4-lb lobster 7 to 8 minutes only, until the shell is red and the tail curls; it will finish under the browning. A fully cooked lobster that is then baked comes out fibrous.
- Fish brothA court-bouillon: fish trimmings or shells with an onion, a carrot, parsley, a bay leaf and a splash of white wine, simmered 20 minutes and strained. Salt it properly, or the lobster will be bland. Salted water works if you have no broth.
- "Melted glaze"Glace de viande or glace de poisson, stock reduced to a syrup. A tablespoon of demi-glace, or a well-reduced shellfish stock made from the body shell, does the same job. It is there for depth and body, not liquid.
- Bechamel quantity"A few tablespoonfuls" plus a little cream, reduced as directed, yields only a small amount of sauce, on the order of 1/4 cup for one lobster; the mixture wants to be barely bound, not soupy. Reduce until a spoon drawn through leaves a track.
- The coralOnly female lobsters carry coral, the dark green roe that turns coral-red when cooked. If your lobster has none, the dish loses colour but not much else; a pinch of paprika restores the tint. The tomalley may be pounded in with it.
- Hair sieveA fine-mesh strainer with the back of a spoon, or a small food processor followed by straining. The point is to get the coral butter perfectly smooth so it colours the sauce evenly.
- Cleaning the shellsSplit the body, discard the head sac and gills, rinse the half-shells and dry them. Trim the sharp legs off so the halves sit flat on the pan.
- BrowningA hot oven, 425F, for 8 to 10 minutes, or 3 to 4 minutes under a broiler set close. You are colouring crumbs, not cooking through.
- YieldOne lobster, split, serves two as a first course or one generously as a main. The folded napkin was standard period service, and would also help keep the shells from sliding on the platter.
Lobster served hot in its own shell under a browned crust was one of the signature restaurant dishes of the 1890s and 1900s, the decades when Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf dining rooms and this book (1896) was assembled. The technique is straight out of the French repertoire that American luxury hotels imported wholesale: bechamel, a meat or fish glaze, a coral butter passed through a sieve, and the shell used as the serving vessel. The best-known member of the family, lobster Thermidor, is generally traced to a Paris restaurant in 1894 and named for the play Thermidor; Oscar's version omits the mustard and the wine but is built the same way. That the recipe simply says "place a live lobster in boiling fish broth" is itself a period detail — it assumes a kitchen with broth already on hand and a reader who needs no more instruction than that.