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Lobster Patties
Take the flesh from the shell of a boiled lobster, cut it into small pieces, and put them into a saucepan with some lobster sauce. Prepare some puff paste, give it six turns, then roll it out flat on a floured table. With a fluted cutter cut out some rounds, place them on a baking dish, lay them on ice for ten minutes, then brush them over with a paste brush dipped in beaten egg. With a plain tin cutter cut through a third of the thickness of the paste, dipping the cutter in warm water every time; this will form the cover when baked. Place the patties in a quick oven and bake them. When they are cooked lift off the inner circle of the patties, scoop out a little of the soft paste inside, and smooth over the surface. Have the lobster warmed, turn it into the patties, and put on the covers. Arrange them on a fancy dish, and serve while they are very hot.
This is a vol-au-vent in miniature: puff paste cases baked with a scored lid, hollowed, then filled at the last moment. Everything depends on the pastry rising straight and the lobster being warmed rather than cooked twice.
- A quick ovenBake at 425-450F. Puff paste needs the high heat to convert its water to steam before the butter melts out; a moderate oven gives you a greasy, squat case.
- Six turnsA "turn" is one roll-out and fold of the laminated dough, with a rest between. Six turns is the count usually given for full puff paste. Store-bought all-butter puff, given an extra turn at home, is a reasonable substitute.
- Lobster sauceLobster sauce of this period was generally a fish veloute or thin bechamel finished with lobster butter made from the pounded shells and coral, often seasoned with cayenne and a little sherry. A cream sauce enriched with the tomalley and a spoonful of brandy is the nearest quick equivalent.
- The hinge: cut the lid, don't cut throughThe plain cutter goes about a third of the way down only, and the cutter is dipped in warm water each time so it parts the layers cleanly instead of pinching them shut. A sealed edge will not rise, and a cut that goes too deep gives you a hole rather than a cover.
- Ice the cut roundsTen minutes on ice, or fifteen in the freezer, firms the butter so the rounds hold their shape. Keep egg wash off the cut sides — it glues the layers and stops the lift.
- Warming the lobsterBring the sauce to a bare simmer, then fold in the meat and heat it through for a minute or two. Boiled lobster held in hot sauce turns fibrous and dry very quickly.
- QuantityThe original gives no measures. One 1½ lb lobster yields roughly 6 oz of picked meat, enough to fill about eight patties cut with a 3-inch fluted cutter, with about a cup of sauce.
- Serve immediatelyFilled cases soften within minutes. Bake and hollow the shells in advance, hold them warm and dry, and fill only as they go to the table.
Patties of this kind descend from the French bouchée, the small mouthful-sized cousin of the vol-au-vent, and they were a fixture of hotel and banquet service on both sides of the Atlantic through the second half of the nineteenth century — a hot entrée that could be assembled fast, in quantity, from components made earlier in the day. Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf, later the Waldorf-Astoria, from 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book reads throughout like a professional brigade's working notes rather than a domestic manual: the instruction to give the paste six turns, to dip the cutter in warm water, and to scoop the soft interior out of each case are the sort of details passed between pastry cooks rather than written for householders. Lobster itself had shifted status over the preceding century, from cheap coastal protein to a luxury of the railroad and ice age, and its appearance in a rich sauce inside puff paste marks it firmly on the expensive side of that change.