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Lobster Rissoles
Make a batter of flour, eggs and milk, allow to each egg one teaspoonful of flour and two tablespoonfuls of milk. Pound the coral of a boiled lobster with the yolks of two hard boiled eggs until smooth; chop the meat of the lobster up fine, season with pepper, a little pounded mace and salt, and mix with it the pounded coral and egg. When the batter is well beaten and smooth, mix the lobster into it until stiff enough to make into rolls. Fry them in salad-oil and serve either hot or cold on a folded napkin. If served cold, garnish with fresh parsley, if hot, with fried parsley.
The recipe assumes you can judge a batter by feel, since the quantities are given as a ratio rather than a total. Work from the texture and the rest follows.
- The hinge: a stiff paste, not a batterPer egg you get 1 teaspoon flour and 2 tablespoons milk, which on its own is thin cream. It is the pounded coral, yolks and finely chopped lobster that carry it, so add meat until the mass holds a shape when rolled between the palms. If it slumps, add more chopped lobster or a spoonful more flour rather than trying to fry it loose.
- CoralCoral is the unripe roe of a female lobster, dark green when raw and coral-red once cooked. Males have none, so the reddish paste and its colour may simply not be there. Two hard-boiled yolks alone will bind and enrich the mixture, though the result is paler.
- Quantity to plan forA single 1 1/2 lb boiled lobster yields roughly 6 oz of picked meat, which with two egg yolks and one egg's worth of batter makes about eight small rolls. Figure two lobsters and 3 to 4 eggs for four people as a first course.
- Pounded maceMace is the lacy aril covering the nutmeg seed, close to nutmeg in flavour but more delicate. Ground mace from a jar works; use about 1/8 teaspoon for a lobster, as it dominates quickly. Nutmeg can stand in, used sparingly.
- Salad-oilIn 1896 this usually meant olive oil, though cottonseed and other refined oils were also sold as salad oil. Any neutral oil at 350 to 375F is closer to the intent than a modern extra-virgin. Shallow-fry, turning once, three to four minutes total; the filling is already cooked and only needs to set and colour.
- Fried parsleySmall dry sprigs dropped into the same oil for 10 to 15 seconds, then drained. Parsley holds water and will spit, so dry it thoroughly and stand back. It goes from bright green to bitter and brown in seconds.
- The folded napkinA period service convention: the linen absorbed frying oil and kept the rissoles from sitting in it. A rack lined with paper does the same job, and the napkin can go under at the table if you like the look.
- Serving coldFried and chilled, the rolls firm up considerably and read as a cold buffet item, which the recipe explicitly allows for. Bring them to cool room temperature rather than serving straight from the refrigerator, or the oil tastes waxy.
Rissole comes through French from an older form meaning something reddened or browned by frying, and by the nineteenth century it covered almost any small fried croquette of chopped meat or fish, bound and shaped by hand. Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book catches lobster at the height of its American respectability: cheap and low in status in early New England, and said by a much-repeated tradition to have been fed to prisoners and servants, it had become a luxury of hotel dining rooms by the 1890s, when rail and ice let New England lobster travel and the Waldorf could put it on the card year round. The use of the coral pounded with hard-boiled yolk is an older English kitchen trick, found in Victorian household manuals for lobster sauces and butters, where the roe served as both thickener and colouring before commercial paprika and tomato paste did that work. Serving fried food on a folded napkin, with fried parsley for hot dishes and fresh for cold, was standard hotel presentation of the era rather than anything particular to this dish.