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Lobster Butter
Take the spawn or coral of a hen lobster and pound it in a mortar with a little salt and cayenne pepper and twice the weight in fresh butter. Rub the mixture through a sieve, and put it in a cool place until wanted for use. This butter will keep a long time, and as lobsters with spawn cannot always be obtained, the cook should endeavour to keep some always on hand, as it is needed for sauce and other dishes. Special care should be taken to break the seeds when pounding the spawn. When the spawn cannot be had, pound the shell of the lobster very finely with a quarter of a pound of fresh butter. Put it in a jar, and place this jar in a saucepan of boiling water. Let it boil gently for an hour, then press the butter through a cloth into a basin of cold water. When it has stiffened, lift it from the water, drain it, pass it through a sieve, and mix with it an equal quantity of fresh butter. Probable cost of lobster, 1s. 6d. and upwards.
Two methods for one thing: a coloured, flavoured compound butter used to finish sauces and enrich shellfish dishes. The first uses the roe, the second extracts colour and flavour from the shells.
- "Break the seeds"This is the hinge of the first method. Lobster roe is a mass of individual eggs with tough membranes; if they are not crushed in the mortar the butter stays gritty and gives up little colour. Pound hard, then push through a fine sieve and discard whatever will not go through.
- Coral and spawnThe book treats the two words as interchangeable. In later usage "spawn" tends to mean the external egg mass of a berried female and "coral" the internal roe, but the terms were often used loosely. Raw, the roe is dark greenish-black and only turns the famous scarlet with heat, so a butter made from raw roe will look drab until it hits a hot sauce.
- Cook the roe firstModern practice is to take the coral from a cooked lobster, or to warm the raw roe through before pounding. Raw shellfish roe worked into butter and kept "in a cool place" for weeks is not a storage method to follow.
- StorageWrap the finished butter tightly and refrigerate for no more than three or four days, or roll it in a log and freeze it for a couple of months. Butter takes up other flavours readily, so seal it well.
- Berried lobstersEgg-bearing females may not legally be landed or sold in much of the UK, the US and Canada, so the spawn version is largely closed to the domestic cook. The shell method exists precisely because, as the book says, "lobsters with spawn cannot always be obtained."
- The shell method, in practiceA jar standing in simmering water is a bain-marie; a covered heatproof jar or bowl in a pan of water at a bare simmer does the same job for the hour specified. Crushing the shells as finely as possible before they go in matters more than the exact timing.
- Straining into cold waterPressing the hot butter through a cloth into cold water sets the fat and drops shell grit and impurities out; lift the disc off once firm, blot it dry, and only then blend in the equal weight of fresh butter.
- Proportions and yieldProportions -- The roe version is one part roe to two parts butter by weight; the shell version ends as roughly equal parts extracted butter and fresh.
- Using itWhisk it into sauces off the heat, in small pieces, as the finish. Boiling it will split the emulsion and dull the colour.
- The price"1s. 6d. and upwards" is one shilling and sixpence, a real but not extravagant sum in a Victorian kitchen.
Compound butters are a cornerstone of nineteenth-century professional sauce work, and lobster butter — beurre de homard — was later set down by Escoffier as one of the standard shellfish butters alongside crayfish and shrimp. Its purpose is economy as much as flavour: shells and roe that would otherwise be thrown out are turned into a keeping ingredient that carries both colour and concentrated shellfish taste into sauces long after the lobster itself is eaten. It is a building block, made in advance and kept, in the manner of a stock or a glaze.