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Lobster
(Mariner's Style.) Boil and cut into dice the meat of a lobster, add 2 onions, chopped fine, a bit of garlic, 2 ounces of butter, and then 1/2 cup of white stock, mixed with the yolks of two eggs. Add parsley, salt, and pepper, cook carefully 20 minutes, add a spoonful of lemon juice and a glass of white wine. Serve in the casserole in which it was cooked.
SHRIMPS. (as cooked in Nancy.) Parboil, cut into dice, and fry 18 shrimps with 1/2 ounce of butter and 1 ounce of chopped ham. Add 1 cup of white broth, parsley, salt and pepper, and the juice of a lemon. Pour into a dish over squares of toast. LOBSTER. (a la Careme.) Boil, pick, and mince the meat of a large lobster, add salt, pepper, lemon juice, or a tablespoonful of tarragon vinegar, 2 ounces of butter, as much flour, and 1/2 cup each of cream and stock. Cover with bread-crumbs and bake 1/2 hour.
Three related dishes crowded into one entry, all of them built on shellfish that has already been cooked once. The main risk is overcooking, and in the first recipe, curdling.
- The hinge: the yolk liaisonIn the mariner's lobster, the half cup of stock is beaten with two raw yolks and must never reach a simmer once it goes in. Hold the pan below about 180F and stir; if it boils you get sweet scrambled egg in butter.
- "Serve in the casserole"Since the dish never goes into an oven, the casserole here is most likely the stewpan it cooked in rather than a baked gratin dish. Any heavy shallow saucepan or small enameled pot that can go to the table will do.
- Twenty minutes is too longThe lobster has already been boiled. Twenty minutes of further cooking turns it woolly. Build the sauce first, then fold in the diced meat and give it two or three minutes to heat through, off a hard boil.
- "A glass of white wine"In turn-of-the-century recipes a wine glass is usually reckoned at about 1/4 cup, though 'a glass' is imprecise and larger vessels were sometimes meant. A quarter cup is the safer reading here, and it is better added early enough to cook off its rawness than after the yolks.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock, made from bones blanched rather than roasted. Unsalted chicken stock is the everyday substitute; a light fish stock suits the shellfish better still.
- The shrimp: eighteen of what sizeThe recipe gives no size, and eighteen suggests small shrimp rather than modern large ones; with large shrimp, eight or ten is nearer the same quantity. Give them a minute a side in the butter and ham, no more, and add the lemon juice off the heat.
- "Two ounces of butter, as much flour"In the Careme version that means 2 oz flour to 2 oz butter, a standard roux. Cook it a minute before adding the half cup each of cream and stock so the sauce does not taste pasty.
- Baking the Careme lobsterThe recipe gives no oven temperature, only half an hour. At a moderate 350F the crumbs brown and the sauce bubbles in about 20 minutes. The mixture is already hot when it goes in, so you are browning the top, not cooking the lobster.
- YieldA large lobster gives roughly 1/2 to 3/4 lb of picked meat, enough for two or three as a first course.
This page files three shellfish preparations, each tagged with a place or a name rather than a method. A la marinière is often said to signal a quick pan dish with wine and butter of the kind associated with ports and fishing towns, while the Nancy shrimp points to Lorraine. The third is named for Antonin Carême, the French cook whose early nineteenth-century writing, produced in service to grand households and courts, shaped practice for a century after; by 1900 attaching his name to a rich, cream-and-butter gratin was less an attribution than a shorthand for grand-manner cookery. All three assume a cook who has already boiled and picked the shellfish.