No. 1043

Small Lobsters a la Carlu, Stuffed Lobster Tails, Deviled

Petits Homards a la Carlu, Queues de Homards Farcies et a la Diable

Split in two lengthwise three or four small, cooked and cold lobsters, and pick the meat from the bodies, cut it into half inch square pieces, and set in a saucepan with half its quantity of cooked mushrooms, cut in quarter inch dice. Put on to reduce three gills of good bechamel sauce (No. 409), incorporating slowly into it the broth from the mushrooms. With this sauce cover the prepared salpicon and use it to fill the half lobster shells that have been well cleaned; smooth the tops and cover over with a thin layer of cream fish forcemeat (No. 76), having it slightly dome-shaped; sift over white bread-crumbs and sprinkle the surface with melted butter, then range the shells on a buttered baking sheet, and brown the tops in a moderate oven for ten minutes, then dress them on napkins.

To Stuff Lobster Tails.—Cut in three-sixteenth of an inch squares, one pound of lobster meat cooked in a court bouillon (No. 38), add to these half the same quantity of cooked mushrooms cut up the same size. Fry colorless in butter, two tablespoonfuls of onions, add two ounces of flour, and fry without browning; dilute with a pint of milk and cook again for a few minutes, then add the lobster and mushrooms, mix well, boil up once, remove, and cool off. Fill the half tail shells, well cleaned and dried, with this preparation, dredge over bread-crumbs, besprinkle with butter and brown them in a hot oven.

For Deviled.—Clean and dry the half body shells; fill them with the same preparation as above, having it dome-shaped, smooth the surface, and coat over with mustard; dredge bread-crumbs on top, besprinkle with butter, and brown nicely in the oven.

← No. 1042 Lobster Tails a la Stanley Lobster No. 1044 Lobster with Cream →

For the Modern Kitchen

Three variations on one idea: a diced lobster-and-mushroom filling bound with a white sauce, packed back into the shells and browned. Ranhofer assumes you have his béchamel, forcemeat and court bouillon recipes to hand, so the cross-references are the first thing to sort out.

The hinge: bind it tight, then chillThe hinge: bind it tight -- the tail filling is explicitly boiled up once and cooled off before it goes into the shells; the Carlu salpicon is covered with the reduced sauce and filled straight away. Either way a loose filling slumps out and weeps under the crumbs, and a thick, cool one holds the dome shape that the browning depends on.
GillsThree gills is 1½ cups (about 355 ml) of béchamel, reduced further with the mushroom liquor. Expect to finish with something closer to a cup of very thick sauce for three or four small lobsters.
Oven temperatures"Moderate" is conventionally read as about 350°F for the ten-minute browning of the forcemeat-topped shells, which need gentle heat to set the mousseline layer through. "Hot" for the stuffed tails and the deviled shells is usually taken as roughly 400-450°F, or finish under a broiler since everything in the shell is already cooked.
The cross-referenced recipesNo. 409 is Ranhofer's béchamel, a flour-and-butter white sauce; No. 76 is his cream fish forcemeat, a mousseline of pounded raw white fish, sieved and worked with cream -- a food processor does it in a minute; No. 38 is one of his court bouillons. Look each one up in the book rather than assuming a modern equivalent, as the details differ.
SalpiconThe word simply means a mixture of small even dice bound in sauce. The recipe's own sizes vary -- half-inch lobster with quarter-inch mushrooms in the first version, three-sixteenths for the tails -- so uniformity within a batch matters more than the exact figure; cut the mushrooms and lobster to the same size.
"Small lobsters"The size is not specified. Something around 1 to 1¼ lb splits neatly and gives shells shallow enough to fill. At a typical yield of roughly a quarter meat by weight, one pound of picked meat works out at about three such lobsters.
Mustard for the deviled shellsA smooth prepared mustard, brushed on thin. Ranhofer does not say which kind, and strengths vary a great deal, so use less than you think: nothing here dilutes it.
Yield and serviceThree or four small lobsters give six to eight filled half-shells — a first course for six, or a light main for four. "Dress them on napkins" means the shells are set on a folded linen napkin on the platter, which keeps them from sliding; a bed of coarse salt does the same job now.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some thirty years running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows the house method at work: nothing is wasted, the shell becomes the serving dish, and one filling is finished three ways to fill out a menu. À la diable — deviled — had meant mustard and pepper on broiled or reheated food since at least the early nineteenth century, and it was a standard way of dressing up cooked shellfish. The "à la Carlu" name, like the hundreds of other personal dedications in the book, most likely honors a patron or a colleague; Ranhofer rarely explains them.