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Lobster and Prawn Soup
Make two quarts of stock from the shell of a fresh lobster and the heads and shells of thirty or forty prawns; flavour it with herbs and vegetables, skim well, and strain. Put it in a saucepan with enough white roux to thicken it to the consistency of cream. When well skimmed, put in the shelled prawns and the white meat of the lobster, shredded, the claws cut into small pieces, and salt, cayenne pepper, and a few drops of cochineal. Cover and leave for five minutes, then put in some lemon-juice and a few drops of anchovy essence, a gill of hot cream, and the coral of the lobster. Do not let it boil again. (See also PRAWN AND LOBSTER SOUP.)
A Victorian shellfish bisque in the older sense: a shell stock, a white roux, and the meat added at the end purely to warm through. The recipe assumes you already have cooked lobster and prawns on hand.
- Never let it boil after the cream and coral go inThe recipe says so outright. Boiling splits the cream and can make the coral grainy. Hold the pan below a simmer from the moment the cream is added.
- Stock timingNo time is given. Crustacean shells give up their flavour quickly; 25 to 30 minutes is usually taken as enough, and long boiling is generally held to muddy rather than improve the result.
- How much rouxNo quantity is given. For two quarts of stock at "the consistency of cream", figure roughly 3 oz butter cooked with 3 oz flour, cooked pale and without colour, then whisked into the hot stock.
- A gillIn this British book a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz or about 150 ml. American readers should not read it as the US half-cup.
- CochinealCochineal is carmine, a red colouring made from scale insects, still sold as a food dye. It is cosmetic only here, added because a Victorian cook expected shellfish soup to be pink; leave it out with no loss of flavour. Some people react to carmine, and it is not vegetarian.
- Anchovy essenceA thin, salty anchovy extract sold bottled. Anchovy paste thinned with a little of the hot soup, or a small amount of Asian fish sauce, does the same job. It should not read as anchovy in the finished soup, only as depth.
- The five minutes with the meatThe lobster and prawns have already been cooked to get the meat out of the shells. The recipe simply says to cover and leave it five minutes; hard simmering from here will make the meat cottony.
- YieldTwo quarts of stock, so slightly more than that finished; enough for roughly eight first-course servings.
Cassell's places this among a run of shellfish soups that all work the same way: nothing is wasted, and the shells and heads that a modern cook throws out are the entire basis of the dish, with the picked meat treated almost as a garnish. That economy is the point of the recipe, in a period when a lobster was expensive enough to justify boiling its carcass for stock. The word bisque is not used here, though the method is the classic one; nineteenth-century English cookery books often kept such preparations under plain descriptive names. The cochineal is the most dated instruction on the page and says a good deal about Victorian table expectations, where the colour of a dish was often held to be part of its correctness. The cross-reference to a second entry under an inverted title is characteristic of the dictionary format, which gathered related preparations under multiple headings rather than settling on one..</br>