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Stewed Lobsters
Remove the claws from four or five freshly boiled lobsters and split them in two lengthwise; pick the meat from the tails to trim it and arrange the pieces in a circle on a hot dish, placing the claws in the center. Put one-fourth pint of melted meat glaze in a small saucepan with two tablespoonfuls of sherry wine; boil, and then move the saucepan to the side of the fire. Mix three tablespoonfuls of breadcrumbs with six tablespoonfuls of butter, a little chopped parsley and a little cayenne. Add this gradually to the meat glaze mixture so as to thicken it; mix with this the creamy part that is taken from the body of the lobster, pounded, passed through a sieve and worked up with two tablespoonfuls of vinegar. Pour this sauce over the lobster and serve at once.
This is a hot lobster dish assembled from already-boiled lobsters, dressed with a butter-thickened glaze rather than a flour sauce. The sauce is the whole point, and it is fragile.
- Do not let the sauce boil once the butter is inThe glaze is boiled with the sherry first, then pulled to the cool side of the range before the butter-and-crumb paste goes in. If it returns to a boil after that, the butter breaks and you get a greasy slick instead of a glossy sauce. Keep it below a simmer and swirl rather than whisk hard.
- Meat glazeThis is glace de viande — brown veal or beef stock reduced to a syrup that sets solid when cold. One-fourth pint melted is about half a cup, which is a lot of glaze; commercial demi-glace concentrate diluted to a thin syrupy consistency stands in, or reduce a considerably larger quantity of good brown stock down to that volume.
- The creamy part of the bodyOscar means the tomalley, the olive-green liver, plus any coral. Note that current advice from state and federal shellfish authorities is to limit tomalley consumption, since it concentrates contaminants and paralytic shellfish toxins; leave it out and the sauce is still good, just less deeply flavoured.
- VinegarTwo tablespoons worked into the pounded tomalley is a sharp amount by modern taste, presumably to cut the richness. A mild white wine vinegar, added by the teaspoon and tasted, gets the effect without souring the dish.
- BreadcrumbsThe recipe does not specify the type; dry, fine crumbs are the likely intent, rather than the coarse fresh crumbs sold today, and certainly not panko. They do the thickening here, so grind them fine or the sauce will be gritty.
- Cayenne and parsleyThe recipe says only "a little cayenne" — read that as a pinch. Chop the parsley just before use; it is worked into the butter and will darken if it sits.
- Yield and timingFour or five lobsters serve six to eight as a course. Have the platter genuinely hot and the lobster meat warm before the sauce goes over — nothing here reheats the shellfish, so cold meat under hot sauce will arrive lukewarm.
- Buying"Freshly boiled" is the operative phrase. Cook them yourself the same day if possible; pre-cooked supermarket lobster has usually been chilled and firmed and will not take the sauce as well.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf dining rooms in the decades when lobster was the signature luxury of American hotel cookery, expensive enough by the time it reached a New York table to signal money. The technique here follows French practice: a reduction of brown stock, finished off the heat with butter, thickened by crumbs rather than roux, and enriched with the pounded liver of the shellfish itself — the same logic that produces a classic lobster butter or a sauce for homard. "Stewed" is misleading to a modern ear; nothing stews. The lobsters are already cooked, arranged in a circular pattern for the dining room, and the cooking that remains is entirely in the saucepan.