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Deviled Lobster
Put three minced shallots in a stewpan with two ounces of butter and the brown meat of the crab; fry until the shallots are lightly browned, then pour in half a pint of milk, add half a tablespoonful of chutney, and season with salt, pepper and a small quantity of cayenne. Stir the whole over the fire until it is thick, then put in the lobster chopped. Have a metal table shell, fill it with the lobster mixture, strew a layer of grated breadcrumbs over the top, baste with three tablespoonfuls of warmed butter and brown in the oven. When done place the shell in the middle of the dish and garnish with parsley.
A late-Victorian chafing-dish preparation dressed up for the dining room: a thick, spiced cream base bound with shellfish and browned under crumbs. The text as printed calls for crab meat in a lobster dish, which is the first thing to sort out.
- The crab reference"The brown meat of the crab" is either a lift from a crab recipe or an assumption that you had a crab on hand for its soft body meat. The equivalent from the lobster itself is the tomalley (the green liver) and any coral, which give the sauce its colour and depth. If your lobster yields neither, a few ounces of picked brown crab meat does the same job.
- Half a pint of milkOne US cup. It reduces to a thick paste, so use whole milk; skim will break rather than bind.
- Shallots and butterTwo ounces is four tablespoons. Take the shallots only to pale gold; "lightly browned" is best read here as colour rather than caramelisation, and scorched shallot turns the whole sauce bitter under the cayenne.
- ChutneyMost likely a sweet, dark bottled Anglo-Indian chutney of the Major Grey type rather than a fresh herb chutney. Chop any large fruit pieces before adding so the sauce stays smooth.
- The hinge: cook the sauce down first"Stir until it is thick" is the whole recipe. The lobster goes into a sauce that is already at coating consistency and is only warmed through; if you add it early and keep stirring over heat, it turns to rubber before the crumbs ever brown.
- Metal table shellA silver or plated scallop-shaped dish sold for serving au gratin at table. Individual gratin dishes or cleaned lobster half-shells work; the point is that it goes to the table in what it browned in.
- Browning in the ovenThe text says only "brown in the oven"; a hot oven, around 425-450F, for eight to ten minutes will set the crumbs and no longer. A broiler for two or three minutes does it faster.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of lobster. One good-sized lobster's meat with the half-pint of sauce will fill one large shell or four small ones, which makes it a first course or supper dish rather than a main for four.
Deviling — reheating cooked meat or shellfish with mustard, cayenne and something sharp — was an English habit that ran right through the nineteenth century, and the chutney here marks the version of it that came home with the Anglo-Indian trade. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and whose Cook Book appeared in 1896, drew heavily on English and French hotel practice. The "metal table shell" belongs to the same world: American hotels of the 1890s sold the theatre of the dish as much as the dish.