cup of bread-crumbs.
½ cup of cream.
2 eggs well beaten.
Season with cayenne pepper and salt.
Cut the lobster carefully into halves with a sharp knife. Pick out the meat carefully, and set aside while you prepare the sauce. This is done by rubbing the coral and the soft green substance, known as the “pith,” together in a mortar or bowl, adding, a little at a time, a table-spoonful of butter. Put this on the fire in a covered saucepan, and stir until it is smoking hot. Then, beat in the anchovy sauce, pepper and salt before adding the cream. Heat quickly to a boil, lest the cream should curdle, put in the picked meat, and again stir up well from the sides and bottom until very hot. The eggs, whipped to a froth, should now go in. Remove the saucepan from the fire so soon as this is done.
Have the upper and lower halves of the shell ready buttered, strew bread-crumbs thickly in the bottom of each, moisten these with cream, and pour in the lobster mixture while still very hot. Put another layer of bread-crumbs, well moistened with the remainder of the cream, on the top. Stick bits of butter all over it, and brown on the upper grating of a hot oven.
In either of these preparations of scalloped lobster, should the canned lobster be used, or should you chance to break the shell in getting out the meat, you may bake the mixture prepared, as directed, in a pudding-dish or small paté pans.
Crabs
Are so near of kin to the lobster family that the same receipts may easily be used for both. Only, bear in mind that the lesser and tougher shell-fish needs more boiling than does the aristocratic lobster. If underdone, crabs are very unwholesome. Also, in consideration of the crab’s deficiency in the matter of the coral which lends lusciousness and color to lobster salads and stews, use more butter and cream in “getting him up” for the table.
Cayenne pepper is regarded by many as necessary in dishes of lobster or crab, because of its supposed efficacy in preventing the evil effects which might otherwise follow indulgence in these delicacies.
Soft Crabs.
For a receipt for preparing these, please see “Common Sense in the Household, No. 1,” page 71.
Turtle Fricassee.
3 pounds turtle steak.
1 large cup strong veal gravy.
4 hard-boiled eggs—the yolks only.
1 teaspoonful anchovy sauce.
1 teaspoonful Harvey’s sauce.
Juice of half a lemon.
2 dozen mushrooms.
1 small onion, minced fine.
1 bunch sweet herbs, minced.
1 glass wine, and butter for frying.
Browned flour for thickening, with cayenne and salt.
Cut the steak in strips as wide and as long as three of your fingers; fry brown (when you have floured them) in butter. Take up; drain off the grease; put with the gravy, which should be ready heated, into a tin vessel with a close cover and set in a pot of hot water. It must not boil until you have put in the rest of the ingredients. Slice the onion and mushrooms, and fry in the same butter; add with the herbs and other seasoning to the meat in the pail, or inner saucepan. Cover and set to stew gently. To the butter left in the frying-pan, add three spoonfuls of browned flour (large ones) and stir to a smooth unctuous paste, without setting it on the range. Add the lemon-juice to this, and set aside until the turtle has simmered half an hour in the broth. Take up the meat, and arrange upon a covered hot-water dish; transfer the gravy to a saucepan, and boil hard five minutes uncovered. Put in the brown flour paste; stir up until it thickens well; add the wine and yolks of eggs, each cut in three pieces, and pour over the turtle.
Panned Oysters.
1 quart of oysters.
Rounds of thin toast, delicately browned.
Butter, salt and pepper.
Have ready several small pans of block tin, with upright sides. The ordinary “patty-pan” will do, if you can get nothing better, but it is well, if you are fond of oysters cooked in this way, to have the neat little tins made, at a moderate price, at a tinsmith’s. Cut stale bread in thin slices, then round—removing all the crust—of a size that will just fit in the bottoms of your pans. Toast these quickly to a light-brown, butter and lay within your tins. Wet with a great spoonful of oyster liquid, then, with a silver fork, arrange upon the toast as many oysters as the pans will hold without heaping them up. Dust with pepper and salt, put a bit of butter on top and set the pans, when all are full, upon the floor of a quick oven. Cover with an inverted baking-pan to keep in steam and flavor, and cook until the oysters “ruffle.” Eight minutes in a brisk oven, should be enough. Send very hot to the table in the tins in which they were roasted.
Next to roasting in the shell, this mode of cooking oysters best preserves the native flavor of the bivalves.
Fricasseed Oysters.
1 pint good broth—veal or chicken—well strained.
1 slice of ham—corned is better than smoked.
3 pints oysters.
1 small onion.
2 table-spoonfuls of butter.
½ cup of milk.
1 table-spoonful of corn-starch.
1 egg beaten light.
A little chopped parsley and sweet marjoram.
Pepper to taste and juice of a lemon.
If the ham be raw, soak in boiling water for half an hour before cutting it into very small slices, and putting it into the saucepan with the
