Lobster Soup
One pint of water, one pint of milk, one tablespoonful flour, a little pepper, two lobsters. Boil water and milk together, add flour, then lobsters. Let it boil up once and put a bit of butter in. Serve very hot.
A four-line milk soup that assumes a great deal of knowledge on the cook's part: the lobsters arrive already boiled and picked, and nothing is said about salt. Two quantities need thought before you start.
- How much lobster"Two lobsters" gives no weight, and the lobsters of the period could be small hard-shell chickens or canned meat rather than large market lobsters. For a quart of liquid, about 1 to 1 1/2 cups of cooked, picked meat is the sensible reading; more than that and you have a stew, not a soup.
- The lobster is already cookedThe recipe takes it for granted that the meat is cooked and out of the shell before you begin. Cut it into bite-sized pieces before the milk goes on the heat, since the window between adding it and serving is under a minute.
- "Let it boil up once"This is the hinge. Cooked lobster meat toughens and turns cottony with sustained heat, so the meat goes in at the end purely to warm through. As soon as the surface stirs, take the pan off.
- The flourA tablespoon of dry flour tipped into hot liquid will lump. Either whisk it with a little cold milk drawn from the pint first, or cook it in the butter as a roux and add the liquids to that. The result is barely thickened, about the body of thin cream.
- Milk over direct heatA pint of milk in a thin pan scorches and forms a skin. Use a heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium heat and stir; a double boiler, common in kitchens of the period, avoids the problem altogether.
- SeasoningOnly pepper is specified. The soup needs salt, and a small quantity of the water the lobster was boiled in, or the liquid from the can, will do more for it than salt alone. A blade of mace or a spoonful of sherry appears in comparable recipes of the period and would not be out of place.
- Butter"A bit of butter" is probably about a tablespoon; stirring it in off the heat helps it emulsify rather than float. Any coral or tomalley from the lobster, mashed with the butter, gives both colour and depth.
- YieldA quart of finished soup: two generous bowls, or four small cups as a first course.
Milk-thickened shellfish soups of this kind sit between the New England chowder and the French bisque, and they were a fixture of American household cookery. Canning had transformed lobster into something portable, shipped inland in tinned form, which is why a cookbook aimed at ordinary kitchens could call for "two lobsters" without apology or explanation of how to get them. The brevity here is characteristic of the genre — these books were written for cooks who already knew how to boil a lobster and needed only the proportions. The later refinement of the same idea, with cream, sherry and a sieved shell stock, is what most people now mean by lobster bisque; this is its plain domestic ancestor.