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Lobster, St. Stephan
Cook and cut up a large lobster, saute it in olive oil, add parsley, salt, pepper, and a tablespoonful of chopped onion. Add cup of white stock and 1 tablespoonful of Chablis, cook 10 minutes, and serve hot.
A terse late-Victorian sauté that assumes you have already boiled the lobster and have stock on hand. The only real risk is overcooking meat that is already cooked.
- The hinge: the lobster is already cookedTen minutes of simmering will turn boiled lobster meat fibrous and dry. Build the sauce first with the onion, stock and wine, reduce it for those ten minutes, then add the lobster at the end and give it two or three minutes to heat through.
- Lobster size and yieldThe recipe says only 'large'. Something in the 2 lb range would yield roughly half a pound of picked meat, enough for two as a main course, or four in small shells or on toast.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock. A light chicken stock works; better still, simmer the lobster shells for 20 minutes in water or chicken stock and use that. Use unsalted stock, since a cup of it reduces noticeably here.
- ChablisA dry white Burgundy, though in American usage of the period the name was also applied loosely to generic dry whites. Any crisp dry white does the job. A single tablespoon is a seasoning rather than a braising liquid, so add it early enough to lose its raw edge.
- Unstated quantitiesThe parsley, salt and pepper are left to judgment: about two tablespoons of chopped flat-leaf parsley suits this amount of lobster, added at the end so it stays green. Cayenne or white pepper is more in period than coarse black.
- Olive oilImported olive oil of this period could arrive tired or faintly rancid after a long shipment. A moderate, not intensely peppery, oil is likely closer to the intended flavour; keep the heat gentle so the onion softens without colouring.
- FinishingThe sauce as written is thin. Reducing the cup of stock by half, or swirling in a knob of cold butter off the heat, gives it enough body to cling to the meat.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a genre that flourished around 1900: the American cookbook assembled from dishes collected, or claimed to have been collected, on European travels, when a growing middle class was crossing the Atlantic and wanted continental cooking at home. Recipes in these books are characteristically brief, since they were written for households that already knew how to boil a lobster and keep a stockpot, and they lean on named signals of authenticity, hence the specification of Chablis rather than simply white wine. The saint's-name title is often taken to follow a French restaurant habit of the era, in which dishes were christened after places, patrons, and feast days; such names are generally said to have been invented in the kitchen rather than inherited, though this is not documented for this dish, and no particular association between St. Stephen and lobster is recorded. The recipe may also reflect what is often described as the period's fondness for taking cooked shellfish and reworking it in a small pan of enriched stock, a treatment applied equally to crab, oysters, and leftover fish.