The Strange History of Lobster Stew
By Sandy Oliver

First published in the MLA Newsletter, March, 2012. See recipe for Lobster Stew

The name stew conjures up a mental image of meat with potatoes, carrots, peas, corn, or turnips. Newcomers to Maine ordering a lobster stew from a restaurant menu are sometimes surprised to find before them a bowl of succulent pieces of lobster swimming in warm cream but with no veggies in sight. Have you ever wondered why our Maine lobster stew is even called stew, or why it is made the way it is?

Here is what happened.

Lobster stew, oyster stew, scallop stew, even tomato stew are more about verbs than nouns. Two and three hundred years ago, recipe titles were as likely to reflect what the cook did with the ingredients as what the resulting dish was called. In English and American cookbooks during the 1700s, such as Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery, first published in 1747, we find many individual recipes titled according to the process used: “to stew oysters,” “to fry eels” while others name the result, as in “a ragoo of eggs” or “buttered shrimps.”

One hundred years later, in the early 1800s, American cookbook authors used more nouns than verbs to describe recipes. Cakes, bread, pies — both sweet and savory — and soups were usually titled with nouns, as in “pound cake,” “muffins,” “pumpkin pie,” and “oyster soup.” Still, recipes instructing cooks about how to prepare meat, fish, pickles, vegetables, and some desserts tended to use verbs in the title: “to bake a shad,” “to pickle peaches,” and “to mash turnips.”

By mid-1800s most cookbooks dropped the prepositional phrase “to stew,” “to bake” and so forth, and switched over to a past tense as in “stewed lobster,” “boiled mutton,” or “potato balls fried.” Desserts were named with nouns and adjectives such as “apple pie” or “peach pudding.” These cookbooks established a pattern we are familiar with today, though modern recipe titles are very likely to add some descriptive adjectives to tell where a recipe comes from or to elaborate on the ingredients, for example, “Shrimp Creole,” “Swedish meatballs” or “One Egg Cake.”

For a giddy little spell in the early 1900s, silly and not very revealing names like “Shrimp Wiggle,” “Pink Bunny,” and “Snickerdoodles” were very popular. That tendency has settled down in recent times to detailed recipe names like “Two-Toned Mashed Potatoes with Goat Cheese” which leave little to the imagination.

So through time, our recipe names have shifted from the verb and adverb versions (“to stew lobster” evolves into “stewed lobster”) to a noun and adjective form such as “lobster stew.” None of these titles give us a clue about what is in the item, though.

Seafood stews in the 1700s were very likely to be cooked seafood, warmed in butter with wine or stock, with mace, cloves or nutmeg and sometimes thickened with bread crumbs. No cream. With the spicing and wine they were a good deal more flavorful than most modern people are accustomed to.

While oyster stew calling for cream appears before the Civil War, a cream-based lobster stew seems not to have been considered an option at that time. In fact, seafood in milk does not really appear much at all. Even the earliest chowders were waterbased, and milk was seldom added until after the 1840s.

In 1880, Maria Parloa wrote her New Cookery Book that, “Canned lobster can be used for cutlets, stews, curries and patties, can be escaloped, or served on toast.” She gives directions for “stewed” lobster: “The meat of a two-and-a-half pound lobster, cut into dice: two tablespoons of butter, two of flour, one pint of stock or water, a speck of cayenne, salt and pepper to taste. Let the butter get hot, and add the dry flour. Stir until perfectly smooth, when add the water, gradually, stirring all the while. Season to taste. Add the lobster; heat thoroughly, and serve.” Still no cream.

By the 1890s one or two recipes for lobster stew show up with milk in them, but classic New England cookbooks like Fanny Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cookbook do not even mention either lobster stew or stewed lobster, never mind whether it had milk or cream in it. They do, however, contain recipes for Lobster Bisque which resemble very closely the lobster stew we know today. A 1913 edition of Recipes for Seafood assembled and published by Boston seafood producers E.A. Rich Company, whose business it was to think up as many ways to use all kinds of seafood as possible, provided four lobster stew recipes by name, one of which is our milk or cream-based one. By 1949 the Fanny Farmer cookbook included a now-familiar cream and milk-based lobster stew.

I’ll bet anything that lots of home cooks from the later 1800s through the middle of the 1900s prepared lobster stew just as they made oyster stew, using no recipe, because it was so very simple to warm up lobster in butter, then add milk or cream to the pan. In any event, in 1944 the poet Robert P. Tristram Coffin, who grew up in Brunswick, Maine, wrote a glowing report of his wife’s lobster stew with which she graced their dinner table through the early decades of the 1900s. Coffin provides details on how she assembled it, including handling all the shells, tomally, and meat. He speaks of milk, and rich cream. He says, “This is no ordinary stew, no curtain raiser to a feast. It is the whole business. The man who gets outside of two bowls of this potage is through eating for some hours, and he is a nobler man.”