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Lobster, Page
Place two two-pound live lobsters in a pan, cover with water, add a tablespoon salt and boil for twenty-five minutes. Remove, split, take out all the meat from bodies, claws and tails and cut meat into equal dice-shaped pieces. Heat an ounce butter in a saucepan, add lobster and gently cook for ten minutes, occasionally tossing, season with a light teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper, sprinkle over two light teaspoons Oriental curry powder and add a half gill sherry wine. Let slowly cook for two minutes, lightly tossing, add a gill cold, thick cream, lightly mix and gently cook for five minutes. Dilute two egg yolks in two tablespoons cream and gradually add to lobster, being careful to mix continually while adding, but do not allow to boil again, pour into a hot tureen and serve with freshly prepared hot toast separately.
A curried lobster in cream thickened with yolks, in the Delmonico manner. The hinge is the finish: once the yolks go in, the pan must never reach a simmer or the sauce will curdle into scrambled egg and butter.
- The liaisonTemper the yolk-and-cream mixture with a ladle of the hot sauce before it goes into the pan, then hold the pan below a simmer — around 170-180F — until the sauce coats a spoon. Five minutes is generous; two or three is usually enough.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz, so the half gill of sherry is 4 tablespoons (a quarter cup) and the cream is a scant half cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making the white pepper half a teaspoon.
- Boiling timeTwenty-five minutes for a two-pound lobster is well past done by current practice; 12 to 15 minutes from the return to the boil is standard, and the meat is then cooked a second time in butter. Err short at the first stage or the dice will be cottony.
- The ten-minute sauteTen minutes of tossing already-cooked lobster in butter is not needed to cook it; the effect is to drive off water and concentrate flavour. Keep the heat gentle and stop as soon as the butter smells nutty and the meat is hot through.
- Curry powderSprinkle it over the lobster and let it fry a moment in the butter before the sherry goes in; raw curry powder stirred into cream tastes dusty. Commercial blends of the period were generally mild and turmeric-forward, closer to a supermarket "mild curry" than to a modern blend.
- Thick cream"Thick cream" here means heavy cream, around 36% fat. Lighter cream, and half-and-half especially, is much likelier to break under the heat and the added yolks.
- SherryA dry or medium-dry sherry — fino, amontillado or oloroso — not cream sherry, which will push an already rich sauce into sweetness.
- Yield and serviceTwo two-pound lobsters give roughly a pound of picked meat: four modest portions as a first course, two as a main. The tureen and separate toast are the period presentation; toast points under the lobster work as well.
- Tomalley and coralThe green tomalley and, in a hen lobster, the red coral come out with the body meat. Both are traditionally mashed into the sauce for colour and depth; discard them if you would rather not, as the tomalley is where contaminants concentrate.
This belongs to the run of lobster dishes in Alexander Filippini's International Cook Book (1906), a compendium by a chef long associated with Delmonico's in New York, where the house style was to name a dish after the patron who ordered it or the occasion that produced it. "Lobster, Page" is one of dozens of such surnames scattered through the book with no explanation offered. What the recipe does document is how thoroughly curry powder had been naturalised into American restaurant cooking by then: it arrives not as an Indian dish but as a seasoning for a French cream sauce finished with an egg-yolk liaison, the same construction as a lobster Newburg with a spoonful of spice added. Filippini calls it "Oriental curry powder," and uses it with the restraint of a man who thought of it as a tint rather than a flavour in its own right.