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Lobster Chowder
Mrs. Lambkin.
Four or five pounds of lobster, chopped fine; take the green part and add to it four pounded crackers; stir this part and add to it four pounded crackers; stir this into one quart of boiling milk; then add the lobster, a piece of butter one-half the size of an egg, a little pepper and salt, and bring it to a boil.
A plain nineteenth-century milk chowder that depends on two things the text takes for granted: already-cooked lobster and crackers used as the only thickener. The line about the crackers is duplicated in the original printing; it is one step, not two.
- "The green part"This is the tomalley, the soft olive-green hepatopancreas in the body cavity, used here as both thickener and flavour base. The FDA and several state agencies now advise against eating tomalley, since it concentrates contaminants and paralytic shellfish poisoning toxins from the animal's environment; many cooks omit it and use only the crackers and lobster meat.
- Four or five pounds of lobsterAlmost certainly whole lobster in the shell, cooked and picked, since that weight of picked meat would swamp a quart of milk. Four to five pounds in the shell yields roughly a pound of meat. If you are starting from picked meat, use about 1 lb.
- Pounded crackersProbably period common crackers or hard water crackers rather than a thin soda cracker, though the book does not specify; crushed to coarse crumbs. Four of them gives somewhere between half a cup and a cup of crumbs depending on size; add them to the milk and let them swell for a few minutes, since they do all the thickening.
- Butter half the size of an eggAbout 1 oz, or 2 tablespoons.
- Do not actually boil it"Bring it to a boil" is the hinge and the trap. Milk thickened with cracker crumbs scorches on the bottom and the lobster turns fibrous within a minute of a rolling boil; heat to a bare shiver, just until steam rises and the surface trembles, then take it off.
- SeasoningPepper and salt are the whole of it, which is consistent with the plainness of the style.
- YieldA quart of milk plus the meat gives six modest bowls or four generous ones.
The Home Cook Book belongs to the wave of American community cookbooks compiled from members' own contributions and sold to raise funds for charitable causes, which is why the recipe carries a contributor's name rather than a house style. The dish itself sits in the New England chowder tradition, where the usual thickener was not flour but broken ship's biscuit or common crackers stirred into hot liquid — a habit generally traced to shipboard and coastal cooking, where hard bread kept and roux did not. Lobster is often described as an everyday protein in this period: it was abundant along the northeastern seaboard and cheaper than it later became, though by the 1870s it was also being canned in quantity and sold beyond the coast. The instruction to use the green part is common in period recipes; the tomalley was valued for richness and colour long before anyone tested what else it might carry.