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Broiled Lobster, Maitre D'Hotel (Procure three)
Procure three one-and-a-quarter-pound live lobsters, cut off and crack large claws with a cleaver, split bodies in two and clean out heads. Arrange on a double broiler, season evenly with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon paprika, baste with a tablespoon oil, broil on a brisk fire, cut part upward, for ten minutes, remove and set in oven to bake for ten minutes. When lobsters are placed on broiler put claws in a tin and bake in oven for twenty minutes. Remove both, arrange on a hot dish, evenly spread a maitre d'hotel butter over, decorate with six quarters lemon and serve. Cup Carolina rice for ten minutes, thoroughly drain, add to other preparation, with a piece butter or lard the size of an egg, a teaspoon each sugar and salt and one and a half teaspoons of yeast in powder. Mix well, transfer into an earthen baking dish, bake in a moderate oven for forty-five minutes or until a nice brown on top, remove and serve in the same dish.
The above is an excellent breakfast dish and highly appreciated by Southern people.
A straightforward broiled lobster with a compound butter, printed here with a stray paragraph from a different recipe attached to the end. A few of the instructions assume a coal range and a nineteenth-century broiler.
- The page contains two recipesEverything from "Cup Carolina rice" onward belongs to another dish entirely — probably a baked rice bread or rice cake — and has nothing to do with the lobster. Runs of type could go astray in compendia of this size. Ignore it, or read it as the fragment it is.
- "Yeast in powder"In that stray rice paragraph this most likely means baking powder, not baker's yeast. "Carolina rice" is long-grain white rice, the name long associated with American domestic production.
- Double broilerNot a double boiler. A hinged wire broiler — two grids that clamp the food between them so it can be flipped whole over the fire. A sheet pan under an overhead broiler does the same work; there is no need to turn split lobster, which cooks cut side up throughout.
- "A brisk fire"Full heat: a preheated broiler element at its highest setting, rack close underneath. The recipe specifies no heat for the oven stage that follows.
- The timing is generousTen minutes under the broiler plus ten in the oven will take a 1¼-lb lobster well past done; the tail meat firms up and dries. Modern practice is roughly 8 to 10 minutes total for a split lobster this size, pulled when the flesh is opaque and the shell fully red. The claws are cooked separately in the oven for twenty minutes, the same total time the bodies receive.
- Killing the lobsterThe recipe assumes the cook splits it live. Drive a heavy knife through the head behind the eyes, straight down, before splitting lengthwise — this is quicker than anything else and the standard method still. Chilling the lobster in the freezer for fifteen minutes first makes it sluggish and easier to handle.
- Maître d'hôtel butterNot defined on this page: softened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, in a common proportion of about a tablespoon of parsley and a teaspoon of lemon juice to four tablespoons of butter. Spread it on the hot lobster so it melts into the meat.
- YieldThree lobsters, split, give six halves — a first course for six or a main for three.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book (1906) reads like the working repertoire of a restaurant that fed the city's wealthy: hundreds of short, briskly written entries assuming a cook who already knows what a maître d'hôtel butter is. That butter — parsley, lemon, salt — is one of the oldest and plainest of the French compound butters, named for the head of the dining room rather than any chef, and it was often used to finish broiled dishes, from steak to sole to lobster. Broiled lobster was a familiar item on American restaurant menus; the Atlantic lobster fishery had industrialised sufficiently by the late nineteenth century that live lobsters reached inland cities by rail, turning what had once been cheap coastal food into a restaurant luxury. The stray closing lines about Carolina rice and their note that the dish is "highly appreciated by Southern people" sit oddly with the recipe at hand, and are a small reminder that these enormous compendia were set in type at speed.