Lobster Sauce
To the "white sauce " (already given), add square-cut pieces of boiled or canned lobster, three tablespoonfuls of cream, cayenne to taste. One tablespoonful of anchovy sauce improves this.
A short assembly recipe that assumes you already have the book's white sauce standing by. Everything depends on the base sauce and on treating the lobster as already cooked.
- The white sauce baseA period white sauce is a butter-and-flour roux cooked without colouring, loosened with milk or a light stock. The book's own version is not reproduced here; a typical ratio is about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and a cup of liquid, simmered until it coats a spoon. Make it thicker than you want the finished sauce, since the cream will thin it.
- Add the lobster last, off the boilThis is the hinge. The lobster is already cooked; fold it in at the end over low heat just until warmed through, two or three minutes. Boiling it in the sauce turns the meat stringy and squeaky.
- QuantitiesThe original gives no lobster measure. Figure the meat of one 1 1/4-lb lobster, or a 6 oz can, to about a cup of white sauce. That yields enough for four servings poured over fish or poultry.
- Canned lobsterCanned lobster was a widely stocked pantry item in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and is now scarce and expensive. Frozen lobster meat, thawed and drained, behaves the same way; drain it well or the sauce will thin and taste watery.
- Anchovy sauceNot anchovy paste. Victorian bottled anchovy sauce was a thin, vinegared condiment, closer in body to something like Worcestershire than to a paste. A teaspoon of anchovy paste plus a splash of vinegar or lemon does much the same work in one tablespoon's worth.
- CayenneAn eighth of a teaspoon is plenty at this volume; it is there for warmth behind the cream, not heat you can name. Season and taste after the anchovy goes in, since that carries its own salt.
- ServingIts usual place is over boiled or baked white fish, salmon, or poached chicken. Keep it warm in a bowl over hot water rather than on direct heat, and stir before serving as it skins over quickly.
Lobster sauce belongs to the long English tradition of dressing plain boiled fish in a rich shellfish sauce, a practice that carried into American cookbooks through the nineteenth century and spread further once canned lobster made the ingredient available inland year-round. Its appearance as a two-line note that refers back to an earlier white sauce is characteristic of household books of the period: the roux-based white sauce was assumed knowledge, and many "sauces" in such volumes are simply that one preparation with an addition — oysters, egg, capers, or here lobster and a spoonful of bottled anchovy. The anchovy is the older touch, a holdover from the eighteenth-century English store cupboard, where anchovy essence and ketchups supplied savoury depth.