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Lobster, Creole
Boil two live lobsters of two pounds each in a gallon boiling water with a tablespoon salt twenty minutes. Drain and let cool off. Crack shells from the claws and tails, carefully pick out meat and cut it in half-inch pieces. Place in a small saucepan one finely sliced seeded green pepper, one sliced white onion and one tablespoon oil, then nicely brown three minutes. Add the lobster, season with half teaspoon salt and saltspoon pepper, mix and brown five minutes. Then add three peeled and finely crushed red tomatoes; lightly mix and cook five minutes. Add six finely sliced canned mushrooms and one tablespoon sherry, mix lightly and slowly cook ten minutes, lightly mixing meanwhile. Pour the lobster into a vegetable dish, sprinkle a little freshly chopped parsley over and serve.
A straightforward tomato-and-pepper sauté of picked lobster meat, written when lobster was cheap enough to boil two of them for a single dish. The main adjustment is timing: the meat is cooked three separate times here, and the first stage is the one to cut.
- Cut the boiling timeTwenty minutes for a two-pound lobster is far too long by current practice; 10-12 minutes from the return to the boil is enough, and the meat gets another 20 minutes of pan time afterwards. Overcooked lobster turns fibrous and cottony, and no amount of sauce hides it.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is usually reckoned at about a quarter teaspoon, though period books vary. Given four pounds of lobster in the shell, taste and add more at the end rather than trusting the stated half teaspoon of salt.
- Killing the lobstersPlunging a live lobster into fully boiling water is still standard, but many cooks now sever the head lengthwise with the point of a heavy knife first, straight down through the cross mark behind the eyes, then drop it in. Either way the water must be at a hard boil before the lobster goes in.
- Save the tomalley and roeThe recipe says only to pick the claws and tails. The green tomalley and any coral from the body are worth stirring in with the tomatoes; they enrich and thicken the sauce.
- Oil and pan sizeOne tablespoon of oil in a "small saucepan" will not hold the meat of two lobsters. Use a wide sauté pan and two to three tablespoons of oil or butter so the pepper and onion actually colour rather than steam.
- Canned mushroomsSix sliced canned mushrooms is roughly a half cup drained. Fresh mushrooms work, but brown them separately first, since they release water that will thin the sauce in the ten minutes allowed.
- The tomatoesThree peeled crushed tomatoes assumes ripe summer fruit. Out of season, a cup of drained canned whole tomatoes crushed by hand gives a better result than pale fresh ones; the sauce should stay chunky, not smooth.
- YieldFour pounds of lobster in the shell yields roughly a pound of picked meat, which serves four as a main course with rice. A "vegetable dish" is simply a shallow open serving bowl.
"Creole" on a turn-of-the-century American menu meant almost exactly what it means here: tomatoes, onion, sweet pepper, a little fat, sometimes mushrooms and a splash of wine, a formula New Orleans cooks applied to shrimp, crab, redfish and eggs alike. The trio of onion, pepper and celery later nicknamed the "holy trinity" is only partly present, two of its three vegetables appearing here.