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March 31
Menu: Deviled Clams; Broiled Lobsters, Melted Butter; Potatoes au Natural Baked Macaroni; Romaine Salad, French Dressing; Snow Pudding, Chocolate Sauce; Coffee Broiled Lobsters-Kill lobsters by cutting tails off with one stroke of the knife, just where they join the body. With another clean cut divide each lengthwise into 2 equal parts, shell and all. Take out coral, the one long intestine and stomach. Crack claws with a hammer. Put within a Criscoed broiler, split side downward, and broil over fire. As soon as juice begins to run freely withdraw long enough to baste liberally with melted Crisco, and return to fire, turning often to keep in juices. Cook about 10 minutes on split or flesh side, and 8 upon other. Have ready sauce made by rubbing 2 tablespoons Crisco to cream with lemon juice and finely-minced parsley, adding little red pepper, and baste lobsters with this while hissing hot. Serve half lobster to each guest.
A 1913 cookbook written to sell shortening, so Crisco stands in everywhere butter would normally go. The method itself is sound live-lobster technique; the fat is the part you may want to reconsider.
- The hinge: do not overcookLobster tail meat is done at about 135-140F and turns cottony past that. Ten minutes flesh side plus eight on the shell suits the very hot, uneven coal fire this was written for; under a modern broiler set to high, a 1 to 1 1/4 lb split lobster wants roughly 6-8 minutes flesh side and 2-3 minutes shell side. Judge by opacity, not the clock.
- "Broiler" means the hinged grill"Broiler" here means the hinged grill -- in this period a broiler was often a two-sided wire basket you clamped the food into and held over live coals, which fits both "put within a Criscoed broiler" and the instruction to turn often. In a modern oven broiler you cannot turn easily, so start shell side down to let the shell shield the meat, then finish briefly flesh up.
- Killing the lobsterThe tail-severing cut described here works but is messier than the standard current method: drive the point of a heavy knife straight down through the head, just behind the eyes, then split lengthwise. Either way, do it immediately before cooking.
- Coral, tomalley and what to discardRemove the sand sac behind the eyes and the dark intestinal vein down the tail. The coral (roe) and the green tomalley are edible and were prized, but current advisories recommend not eating tomalley, which concentrates contaminants.
- CriscoIntroduced two years before this book, Crisco was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a solid white shortening. Today's product has been reformulated and carries far less trans fat than the original. For lobster, melted butter gives the flavour the dish is actually after; use shortening only if you want the period result.
- The basting sauce"Rubbing to cream" means creaming the soft fat with a fork or spoon until smooth, then beating in lemon juice and parsley - a compound butter in all but name. "Little red pepper" is cayenne; a pinch is enough.
- YieldHalf a lobster per person, as stated, suits a multi-course dinner. As a main course, allow a whole 1 1/4 lb lobster each.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which had launched the shortening in 1911 as the first hydrogenated vegetable fat to be marketed nationally on a large scale. The book's job was to prove that a cook could use it for everything - frying, pastry, cake, and, as here, basting shellfish over a fire - so Crisco is inserted into dishes where butter or olive oil had always done the work. The "Calendar of Dinners" section supplied a year of menus, which is why this page carries a dated bill of fare. Lobster is often said to have been cheap enough in earlier generations to be fed to prisoners and servants; by the 1910s it had become a respectable centrepiece for a home dinner party, shipped inland alive or in ice.