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Lobster Fricassee
Partially boil some lobsters. Pick the meat out of the claws and tails and cut them into small pieces, put it into a saucepan with two breakfast cupfuls of bechamel sauce and let the contents stew gently for several minutes. Strain the juice of half a lemon into the fricassee, turn it on to a hot dish and serve at once.
A plain white-sauce fricassee that depends entirely on not overcooking the lobster. The original assumes a cook who already has béchamel standing by and knows what "partially boil" means.
- "Partially boil"Boil the lobsters only until the shell turns red and the meat has set but is still slightly translucent at the centre, well short of a full boiling. It finishes in the sauce; fully boiled lobster reheated in béchamel tends to turn fibrous.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, usually reckoned at about 10 fl oz, so two cupfuls is roughly 600 ml of béchamel. The recipe does not say how many lobsters, so treat this as sauce enough for the picked meat of two smallish ones.
- BéchamelIn this period a milk-based white sauce built on a light roux, commonly infused with onion, bay and clove and sometimes enriched with a little cream. For this dish keep it on the loose side; it thickens as the lobster warms and gives off liquid.
- "Stew gently"A bare simmer, only until the lobster is heated through. The recipe's "several minutes" is the outer limit; longer and the meat tightens.
- The lemonBest added at the very end, off or barely on the heat, since acid stirred into a hot milk sauce can cause it to curdle.
- Don't waste the bodyThe recipe uses claws and tails only. The body meat, and the tomalley and coral if present, can go into the sauce for depth, and the shells make a stock worth keeping.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of lobster, only the sauce; two small lobsters' worth of meat in this much béchamel will serve four as a first course or two as a main. It suits toast, puff-pastry cases or plain rice.
Fricassee originally meant meat cut up, cooked in a pan and served in its own thickened sauce, and by the nineteenth century the word in English kitchens signalled almost any white-sauced dish of pieces of chicken, veal or shellfish. Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) gathered the working repertoire of the Waldorf, where lobster was a standard luxury item on hotel menus. The terseness here is characteristic of a book written for cooks who needed only the proportions and the order of operations.