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Breadcrumbs (Cupful thick cream Salt)
1 cupful thick cream Salt and paprika to taste 2 tablespoonfuls grated horseradish Cut lobster meat into neat pieces, dip in beaten egg, toss in breadcrumbs and fry in hot Crisco to brown well. Whip up cream, season it well with salt and paprika and stir in horseradish; heap this sauce in the center of the serving dish and arrange the pieces of fried lobster round it. Serve hot.
A short recipe with a truncated ingredient list — the lobster and the egg and crumbs for breading are named only in the method. Assume roughly 1 lb of cooked lobster meat, one or two beaten eggs, and about a cup of dry crumbs.
- The hinge: cooked lobster only"Lobster meat" cut into neat pieces implies meat already picked from a boiled lobster; this is a way of using cooked lobster rather than a way of cooking it. Raw meat is unlikely to cook evenly in the short time the crumbs need to brown.
- Frying temperatureBring the Crisco to 350–375F. Below that the crumb coat drinks fat; much above it, the coating colours before the lobster is warmed through. Two to three minutes is enough.
- "Thick cream"Heavy or whipping cream, 36% fat or more. Before cream was sold to standard grades, "thick cream" generally meant the richest cream skimmed off the top of the milk; in any case, anything under about 30% fat will not hold a whipped shape.
- Grated horseradishThe original means fresh root, grated. Prepared horseradish from a jar is packed in vinegar and its liquid will slacken whipped cream — drain it well and fold in less to start, tasting as you go.
- PaprikaIn American cookbooks of this period paprika usually meant a sweet, mild pepper, used as much for colour as for heat. Smoked or hot paprika will dominate the lobster.
- Assembly and timingWhip and season the cream first, then fry, then plate. The sauce softens and weeps if it stands, and the crumb coat goes limp the moment it touches it; heaping the cream in the centre rather than pouring it over keeps the two apart until they are eaten.
- Crisco and substitutionsAny neutral fat with a high smoke point does the same job. Crisco is named because the book is a Procter & Gamble publication.
- YieldA pound of lobster meat serves four as a first course, two or three as a main.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written to introduce American cooks to a wholly new product: vegetable shortening made from cottonseed oil by hydrogenation, sold as a clean, odourless, shelf-stable stand-in for lard and butter. Frying recipes carried much of the argument, since the chief claims made for Crisco were that it withstood high heat without smoking and left no taste of its own — a real selling point against lard, and against butter, which scorches. Fried lobster with a cold horseradish cream belongs to the confident hotel-and-chafing-dish cookery of the period. The pairing of a hot fried shellfish with an unheated whipped sauce has largely fallen out of use, though the logic holds: the cold cream sets off the heat, and nothing has to be held on the stove.