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Lobster Forcemeat
Boil a three-pound live lobster in plenty of salted water for twenty minutes. Remove it, let get cold; then split it in two and with a fork pick out all the meat from the tail, body and claws. Hash it up very fine with twelve canned mushrooms. Chop very fine one medium sound onion, and place it in a saucepan with one ounce butter and brown it well; then add two tablespoons sifted flour; stir well for one minute. Add three-quarters of a pint hot milk, stir again until it boils. Drop in the lobster and mushrooms. Season with a teaspoon salt, one saltspoon cayenne pepper, one tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, half teaspoon English mustard in powder, one saltspoon grated nutmeg. Stir all well with the wooden spoon, then let gently simmer for twenty minutes. Thicken with two egg yokes and slowly boil for five minutes. Remove from the pan, place in a china vessel, let get cold and use as required.
A stiff lobster panada meant to be made ahead and used as a stuffing or filling rather than eaten as a dish on its own. The one step to watch is the finish with egg yolks.
- Do not boil after the yolks go in"Slowly boil for five minutes" will scramble the eggs and break the sauce. Beat the yolks with a little of the hot mixture, return them off the heat, and hold the pan at a bare steam until the forcemeat thickens, a minute or two at most.
- Saltspoon and gill measuresSaltspoon measures -- A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, so the cayenne and the nutmeg are each a scant quarter-teaspoon. Three-quarters of a pint of milk is about 1 1/2 cups by US measure, nearer 1 3/4 cups if an imperial pint is meant.
- The lobsterA 3 lb lobster yields roughly 3/4 lb of picked meat. Twenty minutes is longer than current practice; about 15-18 minutes at a rolling boil is the usual figure for that size, and the meat will be firmer for it. It gets simmered again in the sauce afterward.
- Canned mushroomsTwelve canned button mushrooms are about a 4 oz drained tin. Fresh mushrooms work but are wetter; sweat them dry in butter first or the forcemeat will slacken.
- English mustard in powderDry mustard flour, the Colman's type. It is much hotter than American ground mustard, and half a teaspoon in this quantity is a deliberate background heat rather than a flavour you should taste as mustard.
- Consistency and purposeConsistency -- The mixture should be thick enough to hold its shape on a spoon when cold if it is to be piped, spread or moulded. If it is loose, simmer it down before adding the yolks rather than after.
- Yield and keepingAbout 3 to 4 cups. The "china vessel" is simply a non-reactive bowl; cover and refrigerate, and use within two days. This is a cooked cream-and-shellfish mixture and does not keep at room temperature as the original implies.
- How to use itFill vol-au-vent cases, stuff whole fish or mushroom caps, or shape into croquettes, crumb them and fry. It also returns to the lobster shells, topped with crumbs and browned.
Forcemeat comes from the French farce, a stuffing, by way of what is generally taken to be a folk-etymology that read farce as "force"; by the nineteenth century English cookery used the word for any seasoned, bound mixture stiff enough to be moulded, stuffed into something else, or fried. This one belongs to the classical panade family: a binder of flour, butter and milk carrying the expensive ingredient, extended and firmed with egg yolk so that a single lobster can dress a dozen pastry cases. The heavy hand with Worcestershire sauce, dry mustard, cayenne and nutmeg is characteristic of turn-of-the-century Anglo-American hotel cooking.