No. 1035

Lobster a la Lawrence and Maryland

Homard a la Lawrence et a la Maryland

Cut into twenty-four pieces the tail parts of four cooked lobsters; season them with salt and mignonette. Heat well in a sautoire four ounces of butter, and two gills of oil, add to it the pieces of lobster, and saute them over a brisk fire, adding four ounces of onions, and two small bunches of parsley garnished with garlic, cloves, and bay leaf; moisten with half a bottleful of red wine, and two gills of espagnole sauce (No. 414); put in some chopped mushrooms, and the pulp of one lemon; suppress the parsley and bay leaf, and serve the remainder in a dish with finely shred chives strewn over the top.

Maryland Style.—Cut cooked lobsters in slices one-quarter inch in thickness, saute in fresh butter, moisten with cream, let simmer for a few minutes, and before serving, thicken the lobster with cooked yolks of eggs, crushed with double the amount of butter, then press through a fine sieve, seasoning with red and white pepper and add a little good sherry.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Two separate preparations share one entry: a red-wine sauté in the Bordelaise manner, and a cream-and-egg-yolk version filed under "Maryland." Both start from lobsters already boiled and picked, and both are quick once that work is done.

Gills and ouncesA gill is half a cup, so two gills of oil is one cup and two gills of espagnole is one cup. Four ounces of butter is one stick; four ounces of onion is one medium onion. A cup of oil alongside a stick of butter is generous for four lobsters and can be cut back without harming the dish.
MignonetteIn Ranhofer's usage this is coarsely cracked peppercorns, white pepper in his own glossary, not the shallot-vinegar sauce served with raw oysters today. Crack the corns under a pan rather than using fine ground pepper.
SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan, wide and shallow. Use the widest pan that will hold twenty-four pieces in one layer; crowding steams the lobster instead of browning the shell.
Espagnole No. 414The brown mother sauce, built on a dark roux, brown stock and mirepoix over several hours. A well-reduced brown veal or beef stock, lightly thickened, stands in acceptably; the point is body and depth, not the classical method.
"Garnished with" and "suppress"The parsley bunches are tied with garlic, cloves and bay leaf as a bouquet, and "suppress" means remove and discard them before serving. Fish out the bouquet, along with any loose cloves, before the chives go on.
The Maryland liaisonHard-cooked yolks mashed with twice their weight in butter and sieved is a cold compound thickener. Whisk it in off the heat and do not let the cream return to a boil, or the yolks will grain and the butter will break out.
Lobster is already cookedBoth versions use meat from boiled lobsters, so the sauté and the simmer are for flavour and heat only. Two or three minutes in the pan is plenty; longer and the tail meat turns fibrous and squeaks against the teeth.
YieldFour lobster tails cut into twenty-four pieces would stretch to perhaps six or eight as one course in the Epicurean's style of service, or four as a modern main, though the book states no yield. The Maryland version scales to whatever quantity of cooked meat you have.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry is characteristic of how he worked: a dish named for a patron, set beside a regional American variant, both filed under a single number. The first preparation is essentially lobster — the red wine, the brown sauce, the bouquet of parsley and bay — with an American name attached, a common practice in a restaurant that named dishes after its customers. The "Maryland" version belongs to a different tradition entirely: cream, sherry, and a liaison of sieved hard-cooked egg yolk beaten with butter. Whether the Lawrence of the title was a specific diner or family is not recorded in the book itself.