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Boiling a Lobster and Preparing
To boil a lobster, fill a large kettle with warm water; grasp the lobster by the back, plunge it into the kettle head I first. Add a tablespoonful of salt and a dash of cayenne; cover the kettle and simmer gently for an hour; remove at once from the water; when cold, twist off the claws, separate the tail from the body, take out carefully the green, fatty portion and the "cord." Draw the body from the shell, remove the stomach, which is found in the head, immediately underneath the eyes, and throw it away; split the body and pick the meat from the cells. Cut the tail shell on the under side and remove the meat in one piece. Split this meat and remove the "vein" or intestine, which runs the entire length. The soft, spongy fingers between the body and the shell should also be thrown away. Crack the claws, take out the meat in one piece and prepare it with a silver knife. "LOBSTER A L'AMERICANE."
Make a "mirepoix," consisting of shallots, carrots and a small piece of garlic. Chop this fine and fry in olive oil, but not brown. Cut two lobsters in pieces crossways and put them with the "mirepoix," letting all fry together for a time and add a wineglassful of good claret and one of sherry, a tablespoonful of tomato sauce and one of Spanish sauce. Let this simmer for twenty-one minutes and finish with a good lump of butter. Add cayenne pepper and season highly.
Two things here: a general method for boiling and picking a lobster, and a French braise built on cut-up raw lobster. The boiling time is the one instruction that has to change.
- An hour is far too longA lobster is cooked through in roughly 10 to 12 minutes per pound for the first pound, plus about 3 minutes for each additional pound; a 1 1/2 lb lobster needs 12 to 15 minutes in boiling water. An hour at a simmer leaves the tail meat fibrous and dry. Kill the lobster first with a knife through the head, or chill it well, then cook it at a full boil rather than a gentle simmer.
- WineglassfulIn books of this period a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces, so a scant 1/4 cup each of claret and sherry. Claret means dry red Bordeaux or any dry red.
- Spanish sauceThis is espagnole, the brown veal-stock sauce of classical French cookery, which no one keeps on hand now. A few tablespoons of reduced brown stock or demi-glace does the same job of adding body and depth.
- The mirepoixAs written it is closer to a fine brunoise or soffritto than a modern mirepoix: shallots, carrot and garlic chopped small and sweated in olive oil without colour. Onion may stand in for shallot; do not let it brown or the finished sauce turns bitter against the sweet lobster.
- Twenty-one minutesThat oddly precise figure is for lobster cut up raw and braised in the shell, and even so it is generous. Pieces of raw lobster are set and opaque in 8 to 12 minutes in simmering liquid; if you overshoot, lift the lobster out and reduce the sauce on its own before returning the meat.
- The silver knifeSilver was commonly specified for delicate seafood on the grounds that the other metals of the period could discolour the meat or leave a metallic taste. Modern stainless steel is inert, so any knife will do.
- The green part and the coralThe green tomalley is the liver, and the red coral is roe; both were prized as thickeners and flavourings. Current public-health advice is to discard the tomalley, since it concentrates marine biotoxins and contaminants from the animal's habitat.
- YieldA 1 1/2 lb lobster gives roughly a third of a pound of picked meat. Two lobsters prepared a l'americaine serve two generously as a main course, or four as a first course.
Lobster a l'americaine belongs to the Franco-American cross-currents of the nineteenth century: a lobster cut in the shell, sweated with shallot, garlic and tomato in oil rather than butter, and finished with wine and brandy. Its invention is usually traced to Parisian restaurant kitchens of the middle of the century, though the details are disputed, and there has been a long, unresolved argument over whether the name should be a l'armoricaine, after Armorica, the old name for Brittany, where lobster is plentiful. The dish is Provencal in construction, whatever the label. That an American household manual prints it alongside plain boiled lobster shows how quickly restaurant French cookery reached the domestic reader, and how confidently such books expected a home cook to know what a mirepoix and a Spanish sauce were. Live lobster itself had by then shifted from cheap coastal food to something served with claret.