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Cold Lobster, Mayonnaise
Plunge three live lobsters of one pound each into a gallon of boiling water with a tablespoon salt, and let boil for twenty minutes. Remove and let cool off, cut off the claws and split the bodies in two lengthwise, remove the gravel from the heads and crack the claws. Arrange the bodies and claws neatly on a large dish, decorate the fish all around with a few leaves of lettuce, fill up the empty heads with capers, and serve with a mayonnaise sauce in a cold sauce bowl separately.
CHICKEN (OR TURKEY) CROQUETTES, ST. GERMAIN Carefully pick all the meat off the turkey left over from yesterday and cut it into very small square pieces. Cut in the same way one ounce cooked ham and twelve canned mushrooms. Have one tablespoon sound, freshly chopped shallots in a saucepan with one ounce butter and fry for three minutes, stirring meanwhile; add two ounces flour, stir well until well thickened, moisten with two gills white broth, season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg, stir, and let boil for three minutes. Add two egg yolks, stir well, then add the chicken, ham and mushrooms, and also half a gill sherry; mix well and cook for five minutes, remove from the fire, place on a dish and let cool off.
Dredge three tablespoons flour on a corner of the table, divide the force into six equal parts and roll them out to croquette forms. Dip each one in beaten eggs, gently roll them in bread crumbs, and fry them in boiling fat for eight minutes. Lift them up, thoroughly drain, dress a puree of peas on a large dish, dress the croquettes on top, pour a gill of hot tomato sauce around, adjust a fancy frill at the end of each and serve.
Two dishes run together here: a cold boiled lobster with mayonnaise, and croquettes built from the previous day's roast bird. Both are sound, but the cooking times belong to an era that boiled and fried everything longer than it needed.
- Lobster timingTwenty minutes will make a one-pound lobster stringy. A hard-shell lobster of that size needs about 8 minutes at a full boil, 10 at the outside; it is done when the tail meat is opaque and the shell bright red. Chill it promptly in ice water to stop the carryover cooking, since the dish is served cold.
- Water and saltA gallon of water is light for three lobsters at once /unevenly. Use a wide pot with at least two gallons, or cook in two batches. A single tablespoon of salt is very light by modern standards; current practice often calls for something nearer 1/4 cup per gallon.
- "Remove the gravel from the heads"This is the stomach sac just behind the eyes, along with the shell grit that collects there. Lift it out with the point of a spoon. The green tomalley and any red coral are edible and often left in place, though current advice is to eat tomalley sparingly because contaminants concentrate in it.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of broth is one cup and half a gill of sherry is a quarter cup, four tablespoons. A saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon -- meaning roughly 1/2 teaspoon cayenne in the croquette mixture, which is assertive but not unreasonable for a bland base.
- "White broth" and "the force"White broth is unbrowned chicken or veal stock; a light chicken stock is the modern equivalent. "The force" is the forcemeat, i.e. the finished croquette mixture.
- Chill the mixture properlyThis is the hinge of the croquette recipe. The panade is thick — two ounces of flour to one cup of liquid — but it must be spread out and refrigerated until firm, ideally several hours, before shaping. Warm mixture bursts in the fryer no matter how carefully it is breaded.
- Frying timeEight minutes is far too long; everything inside is already cooked. Fry at 350–375F for 2 to 3 minutes, until the crumbs are deep gold, then drain on a rack rather than paper.
- Yield and the garnishSix croquettes serve about three as a main course. The pea purée underneath is what makes the dish "St. Germain"; a gill (half cup) of tomato sauce is poured around, and the "fancy frill" is a paper cuff that can be skipped without loss.
Both dishes belong to the grand-hotel repertoire that American cookbooks absorbed from French kitchens around the turn of the twentieth century. The tag St. Germain signals green peas, in purée or as a garnish, and is generally traced to the market gardens around Saint-Germain-en-Laye west of Paris, long associated with early peas. The croquette recipe is also a candid piece of household economics: it begins with "the turkey left over from yesterday," and the shallot, sherry, nutmeg and cayenne are there to give leftover roast meat a second, more formal life. Cold lobster with a separate bowl of mayonnaise, meanwhile, was a standard buffet and supper-room presentation of the period.