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Lobster Cream
Pick the meat from a boiled lobster and chop it small; place it in a saucepan, season to taste with salt and pepper and a small quantity of grated nutmeg; moisten with half a tablespoonful of vinegar and one teaspoonful of sherry, stir it over the fire until hot, then dredge lightly with flour and add two ounces of butter and a teacupful of cream. Stir the mixture while it is boiling and let it cook for ten minutes. Wash the body shell of the lobster and dry well, then pour the mixture into it. Place the lobster on a fancy dish and serve it while very hot.
A simple creamed lobster served back in its own shell, from the era when a chafing-dish supper was the height of hotel dining. Two things need attention: the cooking time and the shell.
- The hinge: do not boil it for ten minutesThe lobster is already cooked, and ten minutes at a boil in cream will turn it stringy and squeaky. Bring the sauce to a bare simmer, let it thicken for two or three minutes, then fold the meat through just long enough to heat it.
- A teacupfulIn American books of this period a teacupful is usually taken as somewhere between a gill (about 120 ml) and three-quarters of a cup (about 175 ml) -- in any case smaller than a breakfast cup. Use heavy cream; anything lighter is likelier to break when it reduces.
- Dredge lightly with flourThis means sifting flour over the hot meat and stirring it in, not making a roux. A scant tablespoon is enough for this quantity; more and the sauce turns pasty rather than glossy.
- Two ounces of butterHalf a stick, 55 g. With three-quarters of a cup of cream this is a rich sauce by design — it was meant to be eaten in small quantity from the shell, not ladled over rice.
- The vinegar and sherryHalf a tablespoon of vinegar is assertive against so little cream; plain cider or white wine vinegar is closer to the period than sharp distilled vinegar. The teaspoon of sherry should be dry, not cream sherry.
- Preparing the shellSplit the body shell, remove the tomalley and any roe, scrub it inside and out and dry it well. Warming the empty shell in a low oven before filling keeps the dish from going tepid on the way to the table.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use very little — a few scrapes. Pre-ground nutmeg is flat and will read as dusty against the cream.
- YieldOne good-sized lobster fills its own shell and serves one as a main course or two as a first course. Scale the cream and butter to the meat rather than to the number of eaters.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf, and this is the kind of dish that made the house reputation: an expensive ingredient, a rich sauce, and a presentation that announced itself across the room. Serving a creamed mixture back in the emptied carapace was a familiar gesture in late nineteenth-century hotel and club cookery — of a piece with lobster Newburg and the countless "coquille" dishes returned to their scallop shells. The shell did the work of a serving piece. The vinegar is the older note here: a sharp accent with shellfish that is often said to run back through eighteenth-century English cookery, and that seems to have faded once sherry and cayenne became the fixed seasonings of the Newburg school.