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Lobster, Dressed, with Sauce Piquant
Pick the meat from the body and claws of a freshly-boiled cock lobster, and divide it into neat pieces about half an inch square. Take the yolks of three hard-boiled eggs, pound them well, and mix with them a tea-spoonful of raw mustard, half a tea-spoonful of salt, and half a grain of cayenne. Add very gradually, by drops at first, beating well between every addition, four table-spoonfuls of salad-oil, and afterwards two table-spoonfuls of tarragon vinegar, and a dessert-spoonful of very hot chilli vinegar. This sauce ought to be of the consistency of good cream. Pour it just before serving over the lobster, and garnish with parsley. Time, half an hour to prepare. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A cold lobster salad dressed with what is essentially a mayonnaise built on hard-boiled yolks rather than raw ones. The sauce is the whole exercise, and it behaves like any emulsion.
- Add the oil slowlyCooked yolks emulsify more grudgingly than raw, so the first spoonful of oil really does need to go in drop by drop with hard beating between additions. If it looks grainy or slack, it has broken; start again with a fresh pounded yolk and beat the split sauce into it.
- Cock lobsterA male lobster. The recipe does not say why, but cocks were traditionally reckoned to have firmer flesh and they carry no roe. Any cooked lobster of around 1 1/2 to 2 lb will do; a hen lobster's coral can be pounded into the sauce, which tints it pink and thickens it.
- Half a grain of cayenneAn apothecaries' grain is about 65 mg, so half a grain is roughly a small pinch. Given that a dessert-spoonful of chilli vinegar follows, treat it as seasoning rather than heat.
- Raw mustardDry mustard powder, not made mustard from a jar. English mustard powder is what the book assumes.
- Salad-oilIn Victorian usage almost always olive oil. A light olive oil or a neutral oil gives a sauce closer to what the recipe expects than a peppery extra-virgin.
- Chilli vinegarA standard Victorian bottled condiment: vinegar steeped with dried red chillies. Sold rarely now, but easily made by steeping a few dried chillies in cider or white wine vinegar for a week. Failing that, use plain vinegar with a small dash of hot sauce.
- Spoon sizesA dessert-spoonful is about two teaspoons. Victorian tablespoons ran a little larger than the modern 15 ml, so taste the finished sauce for acid balance rather than trusting the arithmetic.
- Dress at the last momentThe instruction to pour the sauce on just before serving matters: lobster meat weeps salty liquid on standing and will thin the emulsion into a puddle. Keep meat and sauce cold and separate until the plate goes out.
- YieldThree or four as a first course or light lunch dish, as stated, assuming a lobster of about 2 lb in the shell. The half-inch dice is worth keeping; larger pieces shed their coating.
Cassell's belongs to the wave of large Victorian household dictionaries that tried to put a French repertoire within reach of a middle-class kitchen with one servant, and this entry is a good example of the compromise. The sauce is a mayonnaise in everything but name, built on pounded hard-boiled yolks -- a method that ran alongside raw-yolk emulsions in this period rather than clearly preceding them. "Piquant" here is used loosely, meaning simply sharp and well-seasoned, rather than pointing to the classical sauce piquante of reduced vinegar, shallots and gherkins. The two bottled vinegars, tarragon and chilli, were ordinary grocer's stock in the period, part of a large family of flavoured vinegars that has since shrunk to a few survivors. Lobster at 2s. for a dish serving four was not cheap, but nor was it the luxury it became: the British and North American fisheries were landing heavily through the nineteenth century, and dressed lobster appears throughout the era's cookery books as a standard cold supper dish.