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Lobster Sauce, Mock
When lobster butter is in the house, lobster sauce may be easily made, and a little boiled turbot or sole, torn into flakes, may be used as a substitute for the lobster meat. If there is neither lobster butter nor cold fish, boil a thick fleshy sole. Take the meat from the bones while it is still warm, and when nearly cold smear it over with anchovy paste, or the essence of shrimps. Cut it into small pieces, stir them into the required quantity of melted butter, and when this is heated through, serve immediately. Time, three or four minutes to heat the sauce. Probable cost, 6d. per half-pint. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A frugal fish sauce that imitates lobster sauce using flaked white fish and a shellfish-flavoured fat. The whole thing hinges on one word that has changed meaning: "melted butter".
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn Victorian and Edwardian English cookery, melted butter means a thickened butter sauce: butter and flour cooked together, then whisked with water or fish stock and seasoned. Proportions vary a good deal between books, but roughly equal small quantities of butter and flour to about half a pint of liquid will give the right consistency. Plain liquid butter will not carry the fish flakes and will split.
- Lobster butterA compound of pounded lobster shell, coral and roe worked into butter, then strained. It is not something you will find in an ordinary shop; if you want the colour and flavour you make it, or substitute a spoonful of shellfish stock reduction and a little paprika for tint.
- Essence of shrimps and anchovy pasteEssence of shrimps was a bottled savoury extract, now effectively gone. Anchovy paste is still on the shelf and does the same job; use it sparingly, as modern pastes are saltier than the sauce needs and you are also salting the melted butter.
- Turbot and soleTurbot is expensive and Dover sole nearly as much. Any firm white fish that flakes cleanly — plaice, lemon sole, hake, cod cheeks — behaves the same way here. "Thick fleshy" simply means enough flesh to give substantial flakes rather than shreds.
- Skin the fish while warmThe instruction to take the meat from the bones while still warm is practical, not decorative: cooled sole clings to its bones and skin and tears into useless threads.
- Three or four minutes, and no moreThe fish is already cooked. The sauce only needs to come up to serving heat; held longer it goes grainy and the flakes break down into paste.
- Quantities and yieldAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. The book gives its cost per half-pint and says the sauce is sufficient for five or six persons, which suggests roughly that quantity as an accompaniment. A few ounces of cooked flaked fish stirred into that amount is about right.
- CostSixpence per half-pint is a good deal less than a true lobster sauce would have cost — the point of the recipe was to serve something lobster-like on a household budget.
Lobster sauce was the near-obligatory accompaniment to boiled turbot and salmon on nineteenth-century English tables, which made it a standing problem for cooks working to a fixed housekeeping allowance: the sauce could easily cost more than the fish it dressed. Hence the family of "mock" recipes, of which this is a typical example — the texture supplied by flakes of cheap white fish, the shellfish note by lobster butter, anchovy paste or one of the bottled shrimp essences Victorian grocers stocked. Cassell's dictionary prints such economies alongside the extravagant originals, and the practice of extracting flavour from lobster shell and coral into butter is older still, being one way of using the parts of a shellfish that could not be sent to table.