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Deviled Lobster Served in Shells
a Chop the lobster fine, put one tablespoonful of butter and one of flour into a saucepan; mix and then add half a pint of milk; stir until boiling. Take from the fire, and add this sauce gradually to the yolks of three eggs that have been slightly beaten. Add pint of chopped lobster, level teaspoonful of salt, a teaspoonful of fresh red pepper chopped fine, a teaspoonful parsley, a teaspoonful of onion juice (you may like a grating of nutmeg, I do not). Cut the shells, claws, back and tail into oblong pieces. Fill these with the mixture, dust with bread crumbs, and brown quickly in a very hot oven. Serve as quickly as possible.
A thick egg-enriched cream sauce bound with lobster and baked back into the shell. The whole thing hinges on the eggs: the sauce goes to them, off the heat, or you get sweet lobster scrambled eggs.
- Temper the yolks properlyPull the white sauce off the burner and dribble it into the beaten yolks a spoonful at a time, whisking, before combining. Poured in fast, the yolks curdle and the filling turns grainy.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. With a tablespoon each of butter and flour that gives a fairly loose sauce, which is correct here — the yolks and the crumbs do the rest of the thickening in the oven.
- A pint of chopped lobsterMeasured by volume, about two cups of picked meat. That takes several lobsters, which also supply the shells the recipe wants.
- "Fresh red pepper"A fresh red chile or sweet red pepper, chopped, not cayenne or paprika. A teaspoon of ground cayenne in this quantity of sauce would be punishing.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve; a teaspoon takes about a quarter of a small onion. It gives onion flavour without visible pieces in a pale sauce.
- Preparing the shellsSplit the body shell lengthwise, and cut the claw and tail shells into open oblong troughs with kitchen shears. Scrub them, boil them a few minutes and dry them before filling — they are serving vessels, not disposable liners.
- A very hot ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; a 'very hot oven' in period terms is broadly 450–500°F, or you can use the broiler. You want the crumbs browned fast; longer and the yolk-bound filling tightens and weeps.
- YieldServes about four as a lunch or supper dish. The recipe's own 'serve as quickly as possible' means it is meant to go straight from the hot oven to the table.
"Devilled" was in use in English cookery by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century for anything highly seasoned with mustard, pepper or cayenne and usually browned — devilled kidneys, devilled bones, devilled crab. This version is devilled only lightly: a little fresh chile and onion juice in a yolk-thickened cream sauce. Serving the mixture back in the cleaned shell belongs to the same impulse as the French coquille, where the vessel advertises what is inside, and it made a modest amount of lobster go further at a time when lobster was cheaper and more common on American tables than it is now. The aside about nutmeg — "you may like a grating of nutmeg, I do not" — preserves an individual author's first-person opinion.