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LOBSTER (a la Cecil)
Take all the meat from the shell of one fresh lobster, and cut it into pieces an inch square. Melt an ounce of butter in a stewpan, then stir a table-spoonful of flour smoothly into it, and add a quarter of a pint of cream and the same of stock. Stir this sauce over the fire until it boils, then put in the pieces of lobster and make it very hot. Arrange the mixture in a hot dish, with a ring of chopped parsley round the base. Probable cost, 2s. 8d. Sufficient for six persons.
A plain cream-and-stock reheat of picked lobster meat, of the kind Victorian kitchens turned out in minutes from a bird already boiled. The measurements are imperial and the yield is optimistic.
- The hinge: the lobster is already cooked"Fresh lobster" here means freshly boiled, not raw. Once the meat goes into the sauce it needs only to come up to serving heat, a minute or two; held at a simmer it tightens and turns cottony.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so a quarter pint is 5 fl oz, about 150 ml or two-thirds of a US cup. You need that much cream and that much stock, 300 ml of liquid in all.
- The sauce1 oz butter (30 g) and a tablespoon of flour to 300 ml liquid gives a light coating sauce. Cook the roux a minute before the liquid goes in, and add the cream and stock gradually or it will lump.
- StockUse a light fish or shellfish stock, ideally simmered from the lobster shells while you pick the meat. Beef or dark chicken stock will bully the lobster.
- Seasoning, which the original omitsThere is no salt, pepper or acid in the written method. Salt to taste, add a little cayenne, and a squeeze of lemon at the end; a spoonful of sherry or the coral mashed into the butter both belong to this style of dish.
- YieldOne lobster "sufficient for six" assumes a 2 lb or larger specimen and a table of many courses. A 1 1/2 lb lobster yields roughly 6 oz of meat, which serves two generously or six as a small first course in ramekins or scallop shells.
- ServingWarm the dish first, as instructed, since the sauce sets quickly as it cools. The ring of chopped parsley is the whole garnish the recipe calls for.
- Probable cost2s 8d is 32 old pence, a substantial sum in the late Victorian period, on the order of half a day's wages for a labouring man, though rates varied widely by trade and region.
Cassell's arranges dishes alphabetically, so a single lobster entry can run to many variations, of which this is one of the simplest: picked meat bound in a béchamel-style cream sauce, comparable to a lobster newburg without the egg yolks. Names of this kind, "à la Cecil" among them, appear in nineteenth-century hotel and club cookery attached to a garnish or a sauce to distinguish a dish on a menu; what the name refers to here is not known, and the same title covers different preparations in different books. The method is common enough: a lobster boiled whole and finished later in a stewpan, with a flour-thickened cream sauce as the vehicle for reheating cold cooked meat.