The encyclopaedia of practical cookery

(4) Put three small Lobsters in a saucepan containing boiling salted water, and boil them. When done, take the Lobsters out, stretch their tails out, and let them cool thus. Sever the tails and claws from the bodies of the cold Lobsters, open the claws, take the flesh carefully out, coat it with aspic jelly, and put it back again into the shells. Split each tail in half lengthwise, pick the flesh out, and cut it in slices. Clean and wipe the tail shells, place a layer of chopped aspic at the bottom, then put in the slices of meat again, the red part uppermost. Fix in the centre of a pain- vert a small wooden column, ornament the pain- vert, surround the column with parsley leaves so as to form a base for the tails, fix it on a round dish, take the six halves of tails, bending in the same direction, and arrange them on the pain-vert with the pointed ends downwards, leaning them against the column and supported at the base with chopped jelly. Put some neatly-trimmed sprigs of parsley at the top, arrange the finest claws on it, using chopped aspic and parsley to support them. Garnish the base of the pain-vert with croutons of aspic. Stick some prawns on an attelette skewer, and fix it in the top of the column. Fill a sauceboat with mayonnaise sauce, and serve with the Lobster. Baked Lobster. — Pick all the meat from a large Lobster, put it into a mortar, and pound very fine together with 2oz. of butter ; season to taste with white pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg, and then mix with it 2 heaped tablespoonfuls of sifted breadcrumbs. Beat up two eggs, and mix them with the breadcrumbs and pounded Lobster- For details respecting Culinary Processes, Utensils, Sauces, &c., referred to, see under their special heads. Lobster — continued. meat into a paste, reserving about 1 teaspoonful of the eggs to glaze it. Shape on the dish it is to be served in to the form of a Lobster, pound the red part and the spawn, and spread this over it. Brush over with the beaten egg reserved for the purpose, and bake for about fifteen minutes. Serve hot in the dish it was baked in, with the body shells laid over it and the small claws arranged at each Fig. 1083. Baked Lobster. side underneath it to make it look as like a Lobster as possible (see Fig. 1083), and garnish with parsley at each end. Bisk of Lobster. — Two pounds of Lobster boiled in the shell will be sufficient ; pound the flesh in a mortar, and put it back into a saucepan with the same water the Lobster was boiled in. Add to this lqt. of white broth, a bunch of sweet herbs, J pint of raw rice, a little pepper, but no salt ; boil for forty-five minutes, then strain through a fine sieve, adding J breakfast-cupful of cream. Let it warm up without boiling, and then serve with small fried dice of bread. Boiled Lobster. — (1) Fill a large saucepan, or a fish-kettle, with water, and when boiling fast put the Lobster in, head first, so that it may be killed at once. Place the lid on, and let the Lobster boil quickly for half-an-hour or more. Take it out with the tongs, and leave till well drained ; then wipe off all the scum, and mb it over with a little piece of butter tied in a cloth. Lobsters should be boiled according to their size, allowing half-an-hour for lib., and so on.