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Fish Ketchup
Pick out the meat from a hen lobster; one that is full of spawn, and weighs about three pounds. Pound the coral and add it to the meat, with a small tea-spoonful of cayenne, the same of salt, and a wine-glassful of sherry. When well pounded in a mortar together, add the remainder of the wine, or as much as is necessary. If put into bottles, and the air is kept out of them, the ketchup will keep good for twelve months, and any quantity may be used heated in melted butter. From three to four table-spoonfuls will be enough for a large tureen of melted butter.
This is a raw shellfish paste packed in wine and kept at room temperature for a year. The preservation logic does not hold up, and the points below explain the glossary and the failure.
- Why it fails as a preserveThe lobster meat and coral are never cooked, and sherry at roughly 15-20% alcohol diluted through a pound of wet protein drops well below any concentration that inhibits bacterial growth. There is no acid, no salt at preserving strength, and no heat step at any point.
- Botulism specificallyA sealed bottle of low-acid, low-salt seafood held at ambient temperature is the textbook environment for Clostridium botulinum, which is anaerobic and produces toxin without any smell or visible spoilage. "Keeping the air out" is the condition that favours it, not a safeguard against it.
- Raw lobster pathogensUncooked crustacean also carries Vibrio parahaemolyticus and listeria risk. Being pounded in a mortar spreads whatever is on the shell and gut through the whole batch. If you want lobster butter or a shellfish sauce, use a current recipe with a cooking step and refrigeration.
- A wine-glassfulIn Victorian cookery books this is about 2 fl oz (60 ml), not the volume of a modern wine glass. The recipe then calls for "the remainder of the wine", which is left entirely to the cook's judgement.
- Hen lobster and coralA female lobster carrying eggs; the "coral" is the roe, which turns bright red when cooked and was prized for colouring and thickening sauces. Lobster sold today is often not sexed for the buyer, and egg-bearing females are protected in many fisheries and returned to the water.
- "Melted butter"Not simply butter melted in a pan. In this period it means the standard English butter sauce, a flour-thickened emulsion of butter and water served in a tureen with fish, which is why three or four spoonfuls of a strongly flavoured paste were enough to season and tint the whole lot.
"Ketchup" in nineteenth-century English usage meant any strongly flavoured bottled liquid or paste used to season made dishes and sauces, and the family was large: mushroom, walnut, oyster, anchovy and cockle ketchups all appear in the same books, with tomato only gradually crowding them out towards the end of the century. The word itself is generally traced to a Southeast Asian fermented fish sauce, borrowed into English in the late 1600s, and the fish ketchups are the branch that stayed closest to that origin. A spoonful of such a store sauce was an ordinary way to turn plain melted butter into a lobster sauce for boiled turbot or salmon, months after lobsters were cheap. The confidence that a corked bottle would keep for twelve months reflects a heavy reliance on exclusion of air as a means of preservation.