Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Lobster Fritters
Lobster Fritters
Chop the meat of a lobster and a few skinned prawns, put them in a stewpan with a lump of butter and place on the fire until they are hot. Roll out some good paste, cut it into rounds with a cutter, place them in a flat stewpan with boiling lard, and fry until they are nicely browned; drain, pile some of the lobster mixture on each, arrange them on a hot dish, garnish with parsley and serve.
A misleading title: nothing here is dipped in batter. These are fried pastry rounds topped with warm buttered lobster, closer to a canapé than a fritter, and they need to be assembled at the last minute.
- The hinge: don't cook the lobster twiceThe lobster is already cooked when you buy or boil it, so the stewpan step is only to warm it through in butter over low heat. A minute or two is enough; held longer it turns dry and fibrous, and the shellfish flavour goes flat.
- "Good paste"Puff pastry or a rich short pastry, rolled thin — about 1/8 inch. Cut rounds with a 2-inch cutter. Frozen all-butter puff is a fair stand-in and puffs into a sturdy base.
- "Skinned prawns"Peeled cooked prawns or shrimp; a handful, chopped to roughly the size of the lobster pieces, is the intent.
- Frying fat and temperatureA "flat stewpan with boiling lard" is a shallow pan of fat, perhaps an inch deep. The book gives no temperature; modern practice for frying pastry would be around 360–375F. Lard fries pastry cleanly, but any neutral fat with a high smoke point works. Fry in batches so the temperature holds, and drain on paper.
- Season it yourselfThe original gives no seasoning at all. Salt, cayenne and a squeeze of lemon in the buttered lobster make the difference; a spoonful of cream or a little thick béchamel will bind the mixture so it sits on the rounds instead of sliding off.
- Assemble at the table's edgeFried pastry softens within minutes of being topped with a moist mixture. Fry the rounds, warm the lobster, then pile and serve; don't hold the assembled pieces in a warm oven.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. One 1 1/2-lb lobster plus a few prawns will top perhaps a dozen to twenty two-inch rounds, depending on how generously they are piled — a first course for a few people, or canapés for more.
Oscar Tschirky presided over the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book reads less like a domestic manual than a working chef's aide-mémoire: brief, assuming skill, and often silent on quantities and seasoning because the man reading it already knew. Lobster itself had by then completed one of the sharper reversals in American food history: cheap and low-status in the early 1800s, it became a luxury as rail transport and canning opened up inland markets, and by the Waldorf's heyday it was a fixture of expensive supper cards. Dishes like this one — small, rich, showy, meant to be eaten standing or between courses — belong to the era of the long hotel banquet, when a kitchen was expected to send out a dozen little things before anything substantial arrived.