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Lobster, Manhattan
Procure two fine live lobsters of two and a half pounds each, place in a saucepan just big enough to hold them, add a sliced carrot, half a sliced onion, a branch parsley, bay leaf, gill white wine, pint water, teaspoon salt and three saltspoons paprika. Cover top of pan with a coarse damp towel, place lid on, set pan on brisk fire for five minutes, then shift pan beside fire and let steam for twenty-five minutes. Lift up lobsters, detach tails and claws, cut bodies in small pieces and add again to pan, then let liquor reduce on fire to half the quantity.
Mix in a saucepan a tablespoon melted butter and one and a half ounces flour, strain lobster broth into pan, briskly stir on fire until it comes to a boil and let boil for five minutes. Pick meat off tails and claws, cut it in half inch pieces, then add to sauce with twelve sliced, canned mushrooms, a tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, half gill thick cream, half saltspoon grated nutmeg, mix well and let slowly cook ten minutes, stirring once in a while. Prepare a green butter, add it little by little to lobster, continually mixing with wooden spoon while adding, dress lobster in a deep dish and serve with six freshly prepared, lightly buttered toasts separately.
A steamed-lobster fricassee finished with a compound butter, written for a cook who already knows how to break down a lobster. The measurements are all pre-standardisation, and the finish is where it can go wrong.
- The hinge: the green butter goes in off the heatOnce the flavoured butter is beaten in, the sauce should not return to a boil or the emulsion can break and the sauce turn greasy. The recipe says only to add the butter little by little, stirring continually with a wooden spoon; pulling the pan aside first is a modern precaution, not something the text specifies.
- Green butterThe recipe assumes a compound butter the reader already knows: herbs such as parsley, with tarragon, chervil or spinach blanched, squeezed dry, pounded and worked into softened butter. Quantity is not stated here, so judge it by taste and colour. It carries much of the seasoning and colour of the dish rather than acting as a garnish.
- Old measuresA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz), so half a gill of cream is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, making three saltspoons of paprika 3/4 teaspoon and the nutmeg a mere 1/8 teaspoon.
- The towel and lidA damp coarse towel under the lid seals a loose-fitting pan so the lobsters steam rather than boil in the small amount of liquid. Any modern heavy pan with a tight lid does the same job; the towel is unnecessary and, over a gas flame, a nuisance.
- Steaming timeFive minutes over a brisk fire then twenty-five beside it is long for 2 1/2 lb lobsters by current practice, which reckons roughly 18-20 minutes at that weight. Shortening it keeps the tail meat tender, and the meat is cooked again in the sauce for ten minutes afterwards.
- The rouxOne and a half ounces of flour to a single tablespoon of butter is deliberately flour-heavy; the resulting paste is dry and needs the strained broth added gradually and whisked hard. Equal weights of butter and flour, about 1 1/2 oz each, gives a smoother sauce with the same body.
- Bodies into the brothCutting up the carcasses and returning them to the reducing liquor is the whole point of the sauce. Do not skip it, and strain the broth through a fine sieve or muslin before it meets the roux, since shell fragments will otherwise carry through.
- Canned mushroomsCommon in hotel kitchens of the period and mild in flavour. Small button mushrooms sliced and sweated in butter until their water has gone will substitute; do not add them raw, or they will thin the sauce.
- YieldSix buttered toasts are called for, which suggests service for about six, though the recipe gives no portion count.
The International Cook Book is the work of Alexander Filippini, long a manager and steward at Delmonico's in New York, and this recipe carries the marks of that kitchen: live lobster bought by exact weight, a court-bouillon of wine and aromatics, a velouté and a compound butter to finish. "Manhattan" attached to a seafood dish is likely a New York restaurant label rather than a fixed formula — the same borough name that was later pinned to the tomato-based clam chowder in opposition to the New England version — and here it seems to signal little more than the house style: paprika, Worcestershire, cream and nutmeg, a distinctly Anglo-American set of seasonings laid over French technique. Books of this sort assumed a reader with a coal range whose "brisk fire" and "beside the fire" were probably positions on the stovetop rather than dial settings.