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Lobster Cutlets, Ravigote
Prepare a lobster force meat, divide the force into twelve equal parts; lightly roll in flour and give them nice cutlet forms, then dip in beaten eggs, roll in bread crumbs, lay in a frying basket and fry in boiling fat for eight minutes. Remove, drain on a cloth, pour a hot Ravigote sauce on a hot dish, arrange the cutlets, one overlapping another, over the sauce, adjust a paper frill at the end of each cutlet and serve.
A composed fried dish that assumes two other recipes from the same book — a lobster forcemeat and a ravigote sauce — and gives instructions only for shaping and frying. Everything hinges on the forcemeat being firm enough to hold a cutlet shape before it goes near the fat.
- Lobster forcemeatIn books of this period this means cooked lobster meat pounded or chopped fine, bound with a very thick white sauce (panada) or with egg and butter, seasoned, then chilled until solid. Make it a day ahead and refrigerate it; warm forcemeat will slump in the basket and burst its coating.
- "Boiling fat"Fat does not boil; the phrase means fat brought to frying heat. For breaded items over an already-cooked filling, 360-375F is the working range. Below that the crumbs drink oil, above it they colour before the centre is hot.
- Eight minutes is too longEight minutes is likely longer than needed -- the lobster is already cooked and the binder already thickened, so the cutlets mainly need to heat through and colour. At 365F, 2 to 4 minutes will usually do it; the recipe's eight probably assumes a cooler, unmeasured fat. At modern frying heat, eight minutes risks a dark crust, a dried-out interior and a split coating.
- Coating orderFlour, then egg, then crumbs, as written — but pat the flour on very lightly and chill the breaded cutlets for 20 minutes before frying. The rest sets the coating and is the single best insurance against blowouts.
- Ravigote sauceHere it is the hot version: a velouté or reduced white sauce finished with a herb butter or purée of shallot, chervil, tarragon and chives, sharpened with a little vinegar or white wine. The cold, vinaigrette-style ravigote sometimes served with shellfish is a different sauce and would be wrong under hot cutlets.
- Paper frillsSmall pleated paper collars, sold for lamb chops and crown roasts, slipped over the narrow end so the cutlet reads as a chop. Purely decorative; skip them without loss.
- YieldTwelve cutlets serves six as a first course, four as a light main. Sauce the plate first, as directed — pouring it over fried crumbs softens them within a minute.
Moulding a fine forcemeat into the outline of a chop, breading it and frying it was a standard trick of late nineteenth-century restaurant cookery: it let a kitchen serve an expensive shellfish in neat, countable portions and dress it up with the same paper frill used on a lamb cutlet. Ravigote takes its name from the French ravigoter, to revive or perk up, a reference to the sharp herbs and vinegar that cut the richness of butter and cream sauces; Escoffier and his contemporaries list both a hot and a cold version.