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Lobster Patties, Augusta
Prepare and keep hot six small patties. Plunge two live lobsters, one and a half pounds each, in a gallon boiling water with a tablespoon salt for twenty minutes. Lift up, let cool off, crack the shells, pick out all the meat and cut in half-inch pieces.
Heat one and a half ounces good butter in a saucepan, add half a finely chopped onion, four chopped branches celery, one sound, seedless green pepper, and gently brown for eight minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Add the lobsters, with eighteen freshly opened little neck clams, six sliced canned mushrooms, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne and one saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well and cook for five minutes, sprinkle over two ounces flour, and stir well while cooking for one minute. Pour in two tablespoons sherry, one gill hot milk and one gill cream, mix well until it comes to a boil, and let slowly boil for ten minutes. Dilute an egg yolk with two tablespoons cream, the juice of a quarter lemon, and add to the lobster; mix while heating for two minutes, remove, dress the patties on a hot dish, fill with the preparation, cover and serve.
A Delmonico-style creamed lobster in pastry shells, written for cooks who had a fish kettle and a stack of vol-au-vent cases on hand. Two of the timings need adjusting and one step decides whether the sauce holds.
- The hinge: the egg liaisonOnce the yolk-and-cream mixture goes in, the pan must stay below a simmer for those two minutes. Bring it back to a boil and the yolk scrambles into threads through the sauce.
- "Patties" means the shell, not the fillingIn this period a patty is a small baked case of puff pastry, what a French kitchen calls a bouchée or vol-au-vent. Frozen puff-pastry shells, baked and kept warm with their lids off, are the direct equivalent. The recipe yields six, which suggests a first course rather than a main.
- Boiling the lobstersTwenty minutes is far too long for a 1.5 lb lobster and gives cottony meat. Ten to twelve minutes from the return of the boil is the modern figure; the meat is then briefly cooked again in the sauce.
- The clamsEighteen shucked littlenecks added at the start will be cooked for the better part of twenty minutes here and will end up tough. Add them, with their liquor, near the end and give them a minute or two. Their liquor is salty, so hold back on the half teaspoon of salt until you taste.
- Old measuresA gill is half a cup, so the milk and cream are half a cup each. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making the cayenne half a teaspoon, which is assertive. Two ounces of flour is a scant half cup by volume; one and a half ounces of butter is three tablespoons.
- Canned mushroomsCommon store-cupboard stock in this period. Fresh cremini or white mushrooms, sliced and browned with the onion and celery, are better and want no other change.
- "One sound, seedless green pepper"A green bell pepper, cored and seeded; "sound" simply means unblemished. Chop it with the celery and onion.
- Filling and servingThe sauce should be thick enough to mound in a shell without running out of it. If it slackens after the liaison goes in, it will not thicken further without heat you cannot safely apply, so err on the side of a stiff sauce before the yolk.
The book is attributed to Alexander Filippini, who spent years in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, where the house style included naming dishes for patrons, staff and occasions; "Augusta" is most likely a dedication of that kind, though no record survives of who was meant. The dish belongs to an American moment in shellfish cookery, when lobster and clams were plentiful along the Northeast coast and could be creamed together and hidden inside French pastry. The green pepper, cayenne and nutmeg are not what a classic bouchée à la homard would carry -- that would stop at sherry, cream and a yolk liaison -- and suggest the American hotel-kitchen idiom of the period rather than a Paris original.