Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Lobster Forcemeat
Lobster Forcemeat
Fry an onion, chopped fine, in an ounce of butter until it is a golden color, adding a tablespoonful of flour to make a roux. Moisten with half a pint of stock, stirring well and often until the sauce hardens. Season with half a tablespoonful of salt, a little white pepper, the same of cayenne, a tablespoonful of Worcestershire sauce, half a teaspoonful of mustard, a crushed grain of garlic, and a teaspoonful of chopped parsley. Stir this well, adding two pounds of cooked lobster cut in small pieces, with twelve mushrooms, also chopped up very small. Cook for thirty minutes in a saucepan, then put it back off the hot fire; add the yolks of four eggs, stir again for a moment, cool, and use as required.
A stiff, highly seasoned lobster base meant to be piped or packed into something else and then cooked — not a sauce to serve as it stands. Everything hinges on driving off enough moisture that the mixture holds its shape.
- "Until the sauce hardens"This means cook the roux and stock down until it is a thick paste that pulls away from the pan, not a pourable sauce. Half a pint is one cup, and after thirty minutes with the lobster and mushrooms very little liquid should be left.
- The egg yolks are a binder, not a thickenerThey go in off the heat so they do not scramble, and they set only when the forcemeat is cooked in its final form. This mixture is therefore a raw preparation once the yolks are in: chill it promptly, keep it refrigerated, and use it within a day in something that will be baked or fried through.
- Lobster quantityTwo pounds most likely means picked cooked meat, which would take roughly six to eight 1¼-lb lobsters. Frozen or previously cooked tail and claw meat works; chop it small so the forcemeat pipes cleanly.
- Twelve mushroomsProbably small cultivated button mushrooms, so very roughly 6 to 8 ounces. Chop fine; sweating them separately first will drive off water.
- A crushed grain of garlicOne clove, crushed. "Grain" here is a loose word for a single small unit, not the apothecary weight.
- SaltHalf a tablespoon into two pounds of already-cooked, already-salted lobster is heavy-handed by current taste. Start with a teaspoon and correct at the end, especially if the stock is commercial.
- MustardHalf a teaspoon most likely means dry mustard powder, added with the other dry seasonings rather than prepared mustard from a jar.
- Yield and useRoughly four to five cups. It would suit stuffing lobster shells au gratin, filling vol-au-vent or bouchees, or forming croquettes to be crumbed and fried.
Forcemeat, from the French farce, is any seasoned mixture bound and used as a stuffing or filling, and a large hotel kitchen would have had obvious uses for one made from cooked shellfish. The seasoning here -- Worcestershire sauce, cayenne and dry mustard -- belongs to the same devilled register found in chafing-dish cookery of the 1890s and early 1900s, laid over a classical roux base. Lobster was abundant and comparatively cheap on the Atlantic coast for much of the nineteenth century and grew dearer as rail and refrigeration let inland cities bid for it; by Oscar Tschirky's years at the Waldorf it was firmly a restaurant dish.