No. 1030

Deviled, Roasted Lobster

Homard Roti a la Diable

Kill the lobster in hot water; split in two lengthwise, and range it on a baking pan; season with salt and cayenne, and pour over some melted butter. Bake it in a moderate oven for twenty minutes, cover over with maitre d'hotel butter containing plenty of diluted mustard. Serve on a very hot dish, break the shells with pincers made for this purpose, remove the meat and serve them directly on the plates.

← No. 1029 Lobster a la Creole Lobster No. 1031 Lobster a la Duglere →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's method is sound but written for a professional brigade cooking large lobsters. Two things need translating: the oven temperature and the dispatch of the lobster.

Moderate ovenRead that as somewhere around 350F. At that heat a modern 1 to 1 1/4 lb lobster, split, should be done in about 12 minutes; the flesh should be opaque to the shell and still juicy. Twenty minutes suggests Ranhofer had larger lobsters in mind than the ones usually sold today.
Killing the lobsterThe recipe says hot water, not boiling, and gives no time; the plunge was presumably brief, enough to kill the animal and firm the flesh before splitting. A common modern practice is to chill the lobster in the freezer for 15 to 20 minutes to sedate it, then split it lengthwise in one stroke through the head. Either way the animal should be alive until that moment; a lobster that has been dead for any length of time should not be roasted.
Maitre d'hotel butterButter creamed with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper. No quantities are given here: about 4 oz butter to 2 tablespoons parsley and the juice of half a lemon is enough for two lobsters.
Diluted mustardThis most likely means mustard powder slaked with a little cold water and left to stand a few minutes to develop its heat. Prepared Dijon works, but use rather more of it and less lemon in the butter, since it already carries vinegar.
When the butter goes onThe mustard butter is applied after baking, not before. Mustard's pungency is volatile and cooking it out defeats the whole point of the dish, as does letting it sit on the plate; the butter should be melting as it reaches the table.
PincersLobster crackers, or a small kitchen shears. The instruction to crack the shells, pick out the meat and plate it is service work; if you are doing this at home, split the claws before the lobster goes in the oven and let people work at the shell themselves.
YieldOne split lobster per person as a main course, half as a first course. Bake the halves cut side up in a pan just large enough to hold them, so the butter does not run away and burn.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the record of some thirty years' cooking at Delmonico's in New York, and the book carries dozens of preparations of lobster. A la diable — "devilled" — is the standard French kitchen term for anything sharpened with mustard and cayenne, the same logic that gives us devilled kidneys and devilled eggs; the heat is conventionally said to be the devil. That Ranhofer roasts the lobster rather than boiling it is worth noticing: dry heat concentrates the flesh instead of leaching it into the pot, and the split shell doubles as a serving dish. The closing instruction is simply to break the shells and serve the meat directly on the plates — a reminder that the book was written for a staff, not a cook working alone.