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Curried Lobster
Take the meat from some small lobsters and place it in a saucepan with one teacupful each of gravy and cream, and half a blade of mace. Mix two teaspoonfuls of curry powder with one teaspoonful of flour, and one ounce of butter, put in with the lobster and simmer at the side of the fire for an hour. After it is done add some lemon juice and a little salt. Turn it on to a hot dish and serve.
A short Victorian-style curry that Oscar carried into the Waldorf's kitchen. One instruction has to go: an hour of simmering will destroy the lobster.
- Cook the sauce, not the lobsterSimmer the gravy, cream, mace and curried butter for the hour if you like the reduction, then fold in the picked lobster meat and give it two or three minutes to heat through. Lobster held at a simmer for an hour turns fibrous and cottony.
- "Gravy"In period cookery this usually means a meat stock or thin brown sauce rather than the thickened pan drippings we now mean by gravy. A well-reduced veal or chicken stock does the job; fish stock makes it leaner and cleaner.
- TeacupfulPeriod tables put a teacupful at anywhere from about 4 to 6 fl oz, so figure roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup each of stock and cream. Older teacups ran smaller than modern mugs; if the sauce looks thin, reduce rather than add flour.
- Blade of maceA blade is a whole piece of the dried aril, not ground mace. Half a blade is a modest amount; about 1/8 teaspoon ground is a fair substitute, but fish it out or expect specks in the finished sauce.
- Curry powder and flourWork the 2 teaspoons curry powder and 1 teaspoon flour into the ounce (2 tablespoons) of softened butter and cook it in the pan for a minute before the liquid goes in. Raw curry powder stirred into cream tastes dusty.
- Side of the fireA range's cooler edge, meaning a bare simmer. On a modern burner that is the lowest setting, and cream at a hard boil will break.
- Finish off the heatThe lemon juice goes in at the end, as written, and for good reason: acid added to hot cream earlier in the process encourages curdling.
- YieldMeat from two 1 to 1 1/4 lb lobsters with this quantity of sauce serves four as a first course, two as a main with rice or toast.
Curried lobster belongs to the long nineteenth-century Anglo-American habit of treating commercial curry powder as one more seasoning in a cream sauce, alongside Newburg, à la king and Béchamel variations that filled hotel menus. The phrasing here, particularly "simmer at the side of the fire" and "half a blade of mace," reads as English household-cookery language of the sort Oscar Tschirky collected widely for his 1896 volume; the book is less a record of one man's inventions than a working compendium of what a large American hotel kitchen was expected to produce on demand. Lobster was cheap and abundant on the Northeast coast through much of the century before hotel and restaurant demand made it a luxury item, which is why a recipe like this can casually call for "some small lobsters" without pausing over the cost.